In the aftermath of a tragedy, a few steps must be taken immediately. First, turn to social media. Today, support is as easy as changing your Facebook profile picture to the flag of the country of the tragedy du jour! The next step appears to be assigning blame: political gridlock shmidlock, someone's to blame here and it's obviously not us. Next is an outpouring of articles, likes, shares, and retweets. It seems like everyone is abuzz with opinions on how to change the system. Which is great, of course, except that in all this, the system never actually gets changed.
Hannah Hart (UC Berkeley Class of '09) released a video in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings entitled "I'm afraid of you" in which she tells her audience of over 2 million subscribers that they terrify her. Why? Because in that 2 million people lies an incredible capacity to enact change, but also the potential to stay inactive and passively allow tragedies like Orlando, Nice, and Dallas to continue their path towards becoming our new normal. And terrifying isn't a strong enough word for what that future looks like. The bottom line is that a colorful profile picture isn't going to help the world: educating ourselves on the issues is.
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Remember Kony 2012? Ah, what a flashback to the time of silly bands, Justin Bieber's luscious bangs, and that brief period of time when the Invisible Children's stickers were plastered over every open surface. When the documentary dropped, we did what we do best: riled up. We were up in arms about the injustices and cruelty of the LRA, or at least the injustices and cruelty that the lone viral video told us about. But how many of us looked beyond the hype at the deep intricacies running through the culture which allowed Kony to continue? And what about the ALS ice bucket challenge? The fun summer trend that swept the nation was certainly an effective method of raising awareness, but how many of us laughing, drenched teens could name even the cause of ALS or where specifically the money we donated was going? Exactly.
We're really good at getting upset and speaking out, but standing up and putting in the effort to understand the complexities of the issues around us isn't as simple. Ultimately, though, that's what we need to do. It's not so difficult, we just need to put some effort into educating ourselves beyond the "What's trending" on twitter. You can do this by reading a deeper analysis of current events. Subscribe to the Skimm or the NYT daily briefings. When someone makes an argument or claim, don't allow yourself to be a passive receptor and instead research their arguments instead -- that's the only way to form informed ones of your own. The issues that plague our society -- racial divisions, terrorism, gun control, and the rest of the terrifyingly long list -- are charged and much, much more complex than the easily digestible blurbs on the path of least resistance. Even being here, on the Odyssey, is a fine start, but in order to grasp the complexities of our world, we have to actively try and learn about them.
It's easy to believe that all it takes is a few weeks of outrage, hashtags, and "woke" statuses and issues disappear all by themselves. After all, that's what we did with Kony 2012, ALS, and occupying Wall Street, and everything worked out fine, didn't it? Except, you know, it didn't. Now, more than ever, it's on us to educate ourselves on the complexities that define the issues that face our world. That's the only way we can start to fix them.
