In my family, watching the news was as common as brushing your teeth. Eating breakfast while watching Fox and Friends, and watching the local news before bed was a daily routine. If we were in the car with my dad for an extended period of time, we were listening to some sort of news related radio station.
Naturally, my upbringing influenced some of my hobbies and habits. I watch the news every day, I read the news online, and nearly all the accounts I follow on Twitter are news related. I like to keep up with what is going on in the world. However, when I came to Auburn, things were not like my upbringing.
For example, the other day I asked some of my sorority sisters what their thoughts on the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri were. The responses I got back ranged from, "Isn't that Winston's cat on New Girl?" to, "A bad situation that the media is making worse." Can those responses be any more different?
What was I expecting? In the sweet little college town of Auburn, we are in a bubble and it is no one's fault but our own. I will be the first one to admit that when I came to college four years ago, nothing seemed as important as chapter meetings, swaps, socials, and football games. Not even school, the very reason for being at Auburn.
Although we are in college to have fun and find ourselves, and study our butts off, we are also here to become better adults. Who would want to enter the real world with the same look of sheer terror on our faces that we had when we got dropped off at our dorms freshman year?
If you were to walk around Auburn's beautiful campus, you would see a lot of the following: food trucks, club meetings, student athletes, artists, professors, and members of the Greek community as well as students studying, laughing, and enjoying themselves. However, it's not what you can see that is important; it's what you can't.
We can't see how ISIS is terrorizing the Middle East and killing innocent human beings. We can't see the 1,427 (and counting) victims of the Ebola outbreak in west and central Africa. Naturally, we ignore what we cannot see. We ignore it because it is too depressing and because we have a false belief that it would never happen to us -- until one day, not too long ago, it did.
James Foley was an American war correspondent in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya who was brutally beheaded two weeks ago by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a Sunni jihadist terror group in the Middle East. Michael Brown was a teenager in Missouri who was killed by a police officer, and whose death has caused rioting in the streets of Ferguson. Patrick Sawyer was a U.S. citizen and top government official in Liberia, who contracted the Ebola virus and died five days later.
We, as a student body, need to wake up. All those horrible events that we thought could never happen to us, have. Now is the time to rise up instead of blatantly ignoring what is happening in today's society. We are the future. Is this the kind of world that we want to live in?
