If what’s going on now is such a big deal, why is that none of the teenagers I know really care about it?
Song: “Trust Me” by The Fray
We’re only taking turns,
holding this world.
It’s how it’s always been;
when you’re older you will understand.
Quote: “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” Theodore M. Hesburgh
I need to stop reading articles.
The more I read, the more…oblique and negative my thoughts become.
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So I read this from the NY Times. While it is an opinion column, it makes me question and think. This depression – this slump – it’s a big issue. But it is it really another great depression?
A lot of numbers and charts I’ve seen are indicative of some similarities. Similarities that really make me wonder and contemplate. Somewhere in the back of my mind I suppose I should be worried about the people suffering, but most of my thoughts revolve continually around the theoretical concepts of this depression.
Mainly, reactions to it. A lot of my classmates don’t care nor give a second thought about this issue in our economy right now. And frankly, since it doesn’t affect me directly (at least not that I’m aware of) I don’t take it so seriously either. I don’t like to say that, but it is true. The interesting part about this mess, is that we’re living through an interesting time in history – something that our children will be looking at in their classes bored out of their mind to be reading. (Or given some children’s mind set, interested in reading.) This is the stuff that goes in text books and people right essays about.
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What will be said of us in these books in a few years? There was a war, an unpopular war that was supposed to be over quick, but lasted long – way too long. There was an attack on our country, there was a sweep of fear for terrorism. There were people and companies who made greedy decisions. There was an economic collapse. The very first African American president was elected. There was a bailout package and a stimulus bill that citizens shall be paying for for quite awhile. There are all these things going on, and I’ve never cared to understand or fully realize that I’m living the history I read. It’s not just a story felt and seen only in pages, but a life that breathes and will itself come to pass. All those people we read about in history, were real people, and in the time they made their decisions they never expected never truly grasped that they were the books of the future.
The decisions we make now will be judged and critiqued by others in the future.
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The closest 19th-century parallel I can find to the current slump is the recession that followed the Panic of 1873. That recession did eventually end without any government intervention, but it lasted more than five years, and another prolonged recession followed just three years later.
– Paul Krugman, NY Times, Who’ll Stop the Pain?
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How will we handle his? How will others judge our choices? And what, knowing and living all this, will we as people do to change the world when we take over for our mothers and fathers?
Choices by hollowwinds
The world is a large family, and every child will take the reins given by their ancestors. Different reins – doctors, politicians, electricians… We are all interconnected and we all play a role in the shaping of the world – but unlike our forefathers who responded to governmental issues with rage and activity what are we doing?
We are ignoring.
We are silent, but by choice.
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We are not like the young during the Vietnam War, we are not the counterculture. Our voices are not heard, and in fact, there are many out there who do not care. This is not our fight, this is not our war. But will we ever decide to pick our fight, to pick our war? Will we ever take the direction this country needs?
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Perhaps I’m being overly paranoid. But I’m in a class of high school students that are supposed to be the best and the brightest. And I see no evidence of that. I see no reactions, I see no determination, I see no outcry, no involvement, no preoccupation with our country and the events within it.
I don’t even see it coming from myself.
If this is our great depression, if this is our Vietnam, then we as young adults have done nothing to prove our worth in inheriting the globe. What is making this change?
We are different and we have ideals, but do we care enough politically? Do we care enough about the government? Will anything makes us care at this age?
