Pleas

There's a little less than a week left in February. In the past slightly-more-than-three-weeks, there have been FOUR school shootings.

How is this okay? In the past more-than-three-weeks I've been buried in stress, homework, classes, research, and more stress, and not enough sleep. I've been barely aware of what's going on in the world, but those have registered. It makes me uncomfortable, though, that my life (and the lives of everyone else) just keeps screaming along while things like this keep happening. I'm not saying that I have any desire for my own life to come to a screeching halt, but I am saying that I feel like this experience of living without engagement in the world, without more than a few passing thoughts to my surroundings, are probably symptomatic of what society as a whole is going through, and of what is contributing to making so many people feel so lost and alienated.

It is not okay.

I feel like there are a lot of rants that I could line up right now - everything from a criticism of the neo-Puritan work ethic that says that quantifiable achievement is the only way to measure one's worth, to a post-modern emo diatribe against the widespread use of antidepressants and other medications that "treat" mental "illnesses" without actually addressing any of the environments, experiences, or mental faculties, that lead to such conditions in the first place, to a moaning cry for a return to the "good old days" of innocence (whenever those actually were) when people "just didn't do" things "like that."

Those all kind of miss the point, though, and my point is just this: It feels like we're not paying attention. I'm not sure that one could successfully argue that we HAVE EVER been paying attention (see slavery, the holocausts, apartheid, etc) but it doesn't change the fact that maybe we should be.

The good news is that I see a lot of ways for society to start moving in more productive directions. I think that education is a key to this: right now we're in a strange situation where a lot of schools and universities have a sort of "meat factory" mentality - go through, get processed, come out with a seal of approval. It certainly sucks that there are a lot of people who aren't getting the personal experiences they deserve, but the trade-off here is that there are a lot of people (more than ever before, right?) who are being equipped with the skills (imperfect as they may be) to make a difference. Hopefully as the number of skilled people increases, the student-teacher (maybe student-mentor is a better phrase) ratio will start to become something more reasonable. Maybe that could help us break out of this me-first, just-get-through-this, mentality and actually start connecting with the world around us.

It doesn't change the fact that people are going to need to be willing to start Paying Attention, though. Nothing ever forces anyone to pay attention to anything besides their own self, but I don't want to see any more tragedies happen as a result of the fact that we're too comfortable and too safe in our own alienation (of ourselves and other people). People respond to tragedies because it's a rallying point, and a concrete event to deal with, but how sad is it that it has to come to that? Given the volume of recent shootings, it seems like the standard for "tragedy" is also being raised, which is perhaps even more disturbing.

I have a slight admission to make, in that right now I'm so stressed and not open to the idea of doing work that it's really, really, easy for me to rail on about how we need to stop being little factory-people and actually live life. (The grass is always greener, etc...) I think it's still a valid point, though. Everyone I knows talks about feeling "disconnected" (which increases proportional to feeling stressed) and it just can't be healthy in the long run, especially when you consider that society as a whole is feeling that way.

What can we do? I don't think shunning technology and progress is the answer...but what is? What will help everyone, or a large chunk of "everyone" start really looking around at the world around them?