Are you that important

On my way home from work I pulled to a stop at the light. I’m not sure if my car was anxious or just nervous but it seemed to be rattling more than it generally does. All the windows on my car were rolled down because the AC was broken, and it looked as if everyone around me was in the same boat, and it didn’t appear to be helping them either. The wind simply blew the hot air around making me feel even hotter than before. As I sat there scrolling through the radio stations I could distinctly hear a siren. I looked around, and just a block away I could see a fire truck and an ambulance driving towards me. Everyone knows that you’re supposed to get out of their way when an emergency vehicle approaches, but when you’re already crammed up to the line of the intersection as if you were in a Hot Wheels multi-pack, it makes it kind of hard to be any more accommodating. The emergency vehicles got closer and closer and I could barely hear the sound of my music over their pulsing sirens. To my surprise the crossing traffic didn’t seem to remember that when an ambulance has its lights and sirens on it means that there is an emergency. This was evidenced by the fact that EVERY CAR continued to drive through the intersection, even when the ambulance and fire truck were pulled up in the oncoming lanes of traffic inching their way into the intersection. EVEN in this situation, 7 cars drove in front of them. Not only is this a problem because of the obvious state of emergency, but also because these cars were driving right into the mall. That’s right. Whatever emergency is happening in the valley, it pales in comparison to whatever sale they were trying to get to. Someone could have been in danger, or was even dying, but that is irrelevant because Hollister just got a new shipment of jeans.

This leads me to the title of this post, are you that important? Over the past few years I’ve noticed, with ever growing concern that our society is losing its ability to think of others. We have this mentality that whatever I’m doing is so much more important than anyone else—however insignificant our own situation might be. I blame several things for this. 1. Cell phones. 2. I-pods. 3. Reality T.V.

The reason I blame cell phones is because they have forced us to keep our interactions to each other within 120 symbols. Although cell phones give us the ability to call the very emergency people that were being cut off, the majority of their function is txt messaging. We chop and splice our ideas into such tiny messages that no real meaning can ever be gleaned form them. Try having a conversation with someone from generation TXT. It is nearly impossible. They don’t make eye contact, they don’t know how to complete ideas, and their vocabulary is basic (heavens forbid you ask them to spell any of the words either)

I-pods are a problem because they alienate you from the rest of the world. Don’t get me wrong, I love to have my Ipod while I’m jogging, or hiking, but 500 years ago (even 30 years ago) music was a communal experience. You got together and listened to the radio as a family, or as a society. When you heard the news it was probably on a street corner with dozens of other spectators. Now, we just plug in our headphones and block out the entire world. No one can hear our music, and we simultaneously can’t hear anyone but our music. It has effectively closed us off from the rest of the world.

Reality T.V. might seem like an odd cause to the problem, but it maybe contributes more than anything else. Think about what reality T.V. is. It is a bunch of cameras that follow people around for Days, even weeks or months, just to get a few hours documenting the mundane aspects of our lives and blowing them out of proportion to make them appear as dramatic as possible in order to captivate the viewers. What we end up seeing is hours and hours of people going to bars, hooking up, shopping, and freaking out at other people. This skews our perception of what reality is, making us prone to believe that life is just one party after another, with nothing more substantive in between.

All of this, for me is a problem. I miss the time when music was communal. When news was an event that involved multiple people and where decency and consideration were at least more prevalent.