Welcome to The Whatever Nation

By Eric Ivanov on 07/15/2009

Do you care enough to get up from your couch and try to solve world hunger, or AIDS? How about finding a way to get out of Iraq without getting everyone screaming at you? Don't want to do that? Well I guess you're in the same boat as almost everyone in America. The response I hear the most to those questions is, "Ahh whatever. It's never gunna happen." But that's the problem; we don't try to do anything. I guess that's why every time I cross the boarder to America I'm always greeted by a huge red, white, and blue sign that reads, "Welcome To The Whatever Nation."
The real question to ask yourself is why don't you care. Why when you see something on TV, or hear about it from the radio do you just wince, and keep walking? It could be because you don't hear enough about it from the half an hour news segment to affect you. Or could it be that you are just bombarded with too much information to care too much about one thing. Could the massive amounts of information at our fingertips made us numb to the affects that it should produce. It's quite possible.
Every day we go to work information is all around us. We can glance at the front page of the Newspaper as we walk by it, partly because in the morning we have already taken a look at the Internet to get our news. Then we can hear the radio news in the car because every channel seems to turn off the music at the same time. When we turn on the TV, a scrolling yellow bar at the bottom will greet us with news written on it, or a 24-hour news channel that has been replaying the same thing for longest time. But the real problem arises when we sit in front of the computer. We don't have to get up and change the channel, we don't have to move our head to the left to get a better view, but all we have to do is click. Click and you shall receive. You can open up as many windows as you want, listen to a podcast, and watch newsreels on demand. If something hits us the wrong way we can just "click" and its gone.
What about the short time frame the nightly news is jammed into? That seems to be the opposite with the computer. We don't get too much information, but too little. They will just mention it, talk about it for a few seconds, then move on to the juicy story about a "celebrity gone wild." I guess people just don't get the importance of the issues, just the urgency about getting to a new topic.
Whether it is too much information, or not enough, people just seem to go on with their lives with nothing but a whisper about the horror they heard. Can we do something about that, or will be forever lost on the information highway. Welcome to the Whatever Nation.

Additional Pictures: ["Whatever," www.scs.ca, "atom," www.team.com]