The desensitizing of America - A dangerous collision of apathy and hate
Call it the Fox News effect, call it the Obama factor or call it the Breitbart conundrum. Whatever you call it, it’s real and it’s affecting the entire country whether we know it or not.
It is, in a sense, a classic case of the boy who cried wolf. Day after Day (and even hour after hour on the blogs) folks like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Pam Geller are sounding apparent “alarm bells” about all kinds of nasty stuff that’s apparently set to befall our country.
But as the supersaturation of media starts to numb our minds, the outrage factor goes out the window. What used to be “Oh my god! What the hell is going on here?!” has now degraded to “Yawn…not this shit again….” On the surface this might seem like a good thing, because it will draw attention down from folks like Pamela Geller and her friends.
But not so fast. “Desensitize” is defined by dictionary.com as:
2.
to make indifferent, unaware, or the like, in feeling. \
The first world says it all: indifferent.
As the right wing machine keeps rolling, the religious and racial concerns are growing daily…but so is the apathy of the average American. It’s no longer outrage, it’s just same old same old.
Don’t think for a second the bloggers and commentators don’t realize this. They do and it’s a matter of concern for them because they need readers/viewers to keep their blogs and shows making money.
Unfortunately there’s only one real way to overcome the apathy effect: You have to take it up a notch.
Like a drug addict who needs a consistently stronger hit to get high each time, the blogs and commentators need to start making more extreme and more outlandish statements to get the “oh my god!” response out of the average joe.
As these statements and rhetoric escalate, the fire just gets more and more gasoline dumped on it and it’s only a matter of time before it starts to, one way or another, burn out of control.
We can only hope this doesn’t happen and that at some point sanity and rational thought finally prevails. Sadly that seems a more and more remote possibility with each passing day.
With the media saturation showing no signs of letting up and the possibility of a real wolf showing up at any time, will anyone notice before it’s too late?