Global events that shock and horrify the world are almost too common to keep track of. News coverage is constantly updated with overseas terrors as well as homeland terrors and there’s an enormous bombardment of information from every source.
In simple terms: terrible things happen every day, and it’s almost impossible to know about them all.
Yes, that’s a particularly depressing mindset. But it bears so much truth. The biggest issue with our daily intake of news is that we are forced to sift through various topics and tragedies to determine which ones are worth a conversation. It's during our moments of deciphering news and qualifying what’s more important, that an unintentional hierarchy forms in our perception of otherwise all individually important events. But what is the ultimate effect of this? Believe it or not, we've already studied and observed something very similar.
When video games became a common household staple for younger boys, there was a panicked controversy that video games were causing and stimulating violence. A proposed reason for this was the desensitization that one can undergo when repeatedly exposed to graphic images or violence.
When put into a simulated world, the effects of such constant bombardment of gruesome information on a young psyche is measurable and comprehensible.
But the backlash and psychological effects of our constant awareness of tragedy and ultimate inability to do anything about is something we can’t even begin to measure.
There is an invisible blanket of desensitization spread out across the nation.
One of the scariest parts about this generalization is realizing that its effects are now beginning to be felt at younger and younger ages. It used to be that only adults and older people would be around information that was seriously distressing enough to require a unique emotionless compartmentalization of information. In other words, most people weren’t forced to become desensitized until they were significantly older. But nowadays with the prominence of Youtube, Vine, and other apps and platforms, young people are constantly exposed to information and topics that they may not be prepared to handle.
A perfect example to illustrate this is the Logan Paul controversy. If you’re not too certain of what this controversy is about, let me summarize it briefly.
In a nutshell, a young Viner-turned-Youtuber named Logan Paul went into a forest in Japan notorious for being a place where people committed suicide. Therein he filmed his reaction to and a glimpse of a dead man who had hanged himself.
The problematic view of suicide and the entertainment value with which Paul had regarded another fellow human being is just the beginning of the issues this video perpetuated. Not only did the video display a distinct lack of respect and courtesy toward the individual who had committed suicide, but it was evidence of a wave of non-empathy that seems to be developing in our and younger generations. For most people, the body of dead man is something to be upset about and to get help for. For Logan Paul, it was an object in his mission for likes and views.
Young people are exposed to individuals like Logan Paul and his non-empathy and disrespect for the dead. Its problematic things like this that encourage the blanket of desensitization to descend further and further onto us.
Obviously, not just young people are subject to psyche-harming levels of desensitization.
To demonstrate why I cite the onslaught of Hollywood sexual assault cases that have come to light recently. From Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey to Aziz Ansari, suddenly, it seems as if no one in Hollywood has clean hands. All of these separate incidents and individuals deserve their stories to be properly explained and elucidated so I won't go into too much of the details but I digress. What's important is to realize what they all have in common.
Maybe it was when the President of our country had a video leaked of him professing his ability to “grab women by the pussy” that we, as a country, finally lost it.
Sexual assault cases and stories that one could never have suspected or even imagined in a million years began to flood into the news cycles and many of them raised the same questions about victim blaming, problematic men in positions of power, and preventative legislation. But despite all of the coverage, it appears that we have not moved forward in any deliberate manner.
It almost feels like, once again, society is becoming desensitized to this immense and tragic problem (just think about Roy Moore and his supporters that fastidiously support him despite his sordid history with young women).
Something is very wrong with how we should be processing and progressing from tragedy. And it seems like the blanket of desensitization might just be getting tighter and tighter around us every day. It begs the question: how can we move forward in the various struggles for justice and awareness when there’s wool over our eyes?
