I was talking to a friend yesterday about the apathy of this generation of youth on key political and social issues. I said that if the Generation of ‘68 had gone through what this generation is going through they would be occupying the College Dean’s Office and burning something down. This generation seems to take everything with barely a whimper. I said it is because they aren’t being forced to sacrifice. No one is paying for our foreign wars. No one is being drafted.
My friend pointed out that no one gets to see what’s going on either. She reminded me, for example, that the war in Vietnam was in America’s living room daily. The horror, the screaming children, the dead bodies, and the caskets bringing home the American dead were plainly there for all to see. And Americans were horrified.
This morning I happened on a blog which noted the same absence of journalism in Iraq. We don’t see the war. We don’t feel the pain of our troops or the Iraqi people. It has no visceral effect on us. Therefore, as my friend said, the injustices of the war are lost on us unless we have loved ones in it. The blog ends with the line:
“To blind the people, you only have to do one thing: Kill all the storytellers.” Very true.
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