OMG. You guys are so not going to believe this.
I was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year!
That’s right ““ ME! I finally can take my well-deserved
place alongside luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther
King Jr. and FDR. All those guys did was end some war and economic
depression and fight racism or … whatever.
What I did is at least equally important, according to Time
magazine. What was it, you ask?
I found this totally crazy video of two turtles having sex! And
at the end, one makes a moaning noise! So I uploaded it to this
really cool Web site called YouTube where thousands of people could
watch it! It’s like, a totally imagined community! I really
made a difference in our society! Why I …
Oh God, forget it. I can’t keep this sarcasm up for a
whole column.
It never ceases to amaze me how inward and self-absorbed
we’ve become as a culture, perfectly symbolized by an
increasingly narcissistic press embodied by Time magazine. Some
huge things happened this year, chief among them the
Israel-Hezbollah crisis, the Democrats’ sweep of Congress,
growing tension with Iran and North Korea and an increasingly
out-of-control war in Iraq. Time had a good deal of people on which
they could have bestowed the honor of Person of the Year.
So who did they pick?
The fact that old footage of you and your buddies lighting a
pile of dog crap on fire on someone’s doorstep can now be
seen by anyone who logs onto YouTube and searches “dog crap
fire.”
Or our ability to make avatars of ourselves in “Second
Life” and spend real money while trying to get people to have
cybersex with us in what is essentially a more interactive, naughty
version of “The Sims.”
Or that we, as college students, have so few pressing reasons to
be interested in world affairs that the biggest student activist
protest since Vietnam was actually the Facebook News Feed fiasco,
which people claimed was an invasion of their privacy (never mind
that you cease having privacy when you put your information on
Facebook to begin with).
It makes sense we would end up considering Facebook, MySpace and
YouTube to be the most important developments of the year.
We, as college students, have been retreating into ourselves
more and more for quite some time now.
For many of us, our biggest concerns are ourselves. With the
rare exceptions of events such as the Darfur crisis, we largely
don’t proactively care about causes around the world.
But then again, why should we?
Not to sound selfish, but what do we have to make us care about
what’s happening beyond our Top 8 on MySpace? There are
really only two answers to this: a military draft and the constant
fear of annihilation.
Our parents’ generation had both of these things, while we
only have one of them and it’s not exactly as clear-cut as
theirs was.
Our parents had something real to worry about ““ being
drafted or being blown up by a Soviet nuke.
We’re blessed not to have to worry about ourselves or our
friends getting sent off to fight an unpopular war.
If this were the case, however, and people started getting
picked up off the UCLA campus and sent to Fallujah, I’d bet
my subsequent Daily Bruin paychecks that our generation’s
apathy would disappear in quite a hurry, simply because we’d
have something very tangible to lose: our lives.
Yet that will probably never happen. After all, the people
stopping a draft from being put in place are members of our
parents’ generation who abhor the thought of sending their
own children off to war.
All we really have to worry about is the possibility that maybe
our plane will get hijacked, we’ll be in the wrong place at
the wrong time when a suicide bomb goes off, or someone will sneak
a nuke into a suitcase in a major city.
But in the end, those things aren’t tangible and
don’t affect us in a real, immediately obvious way. Unless we
think about them.
At which point you search “dog crap fire” on YouTube
and forget about everything.
Humphrey’s brain gets a workout whenever his favorite
shows are on reruns. E-mail him at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.