My consideration’s today will be upon one of the oldest sorts of complaints against democracy in Western thought (see Plato’s Republic and Thucydides).
Only thing is I’ll be looking at this through a racy topic. (Yes, in fact I am that uncouth to make that pun). I am not going to touch the results of the trial, I don’t know enough about the situation and claim no knowledge of it. My complaint is simply about the response citizens in the U.S. to the results of the trial.
To make sure this is clear, my complaint is about those in the U.S. who never do anything to support racial equality or try to help solve the race relations issues that the U.S. is buried in. The problem I am dealing with is all of those who are pop protesters and only partake in the biggest problems that are discussed on the news instead of actually attaching to a cause and supporting it in full actively and passively.
Any organization such as NAACP and other groups who actually constantly fight against the issues embodied in the Zimmerman trial are of no interest to me in this short piece, they are committed to their causes and trying to push back against the court’s decision is far from being hypocritical and good on them for trying to ride the wave of support that came in from others. I wish it had worked out better for them.
Now, the bone I have to pick is against everyone else. All of those people who just live their lives, watching the news and then suddenly decided to jump onto the bandwagon to protest this trial and haven’t thought about it since they left their last protest action. They are the issue, they embody the weakness of democracy which I want to address: groups of people, emotions and the inability to focus in on issues.
I am not sure of a good way to phrase the exact issue I am trying to approach but the general idea is the fact that in a democracy like that of the U.S. a large portion of the population will claim to be in support of some cause, but they never really do anything for it. They will support it when journalists decide it would make a good story, but never stick with it. In my lifetime there are two things that the U.S. has been able to focus on for more than about a month: 9/11 and the death of Michael Jackson. Think about that.
For the United States, as a country, I would probably be willing to argue that this is the single largest hurdle to get over in order to start making serious changes to ourselves and most likely improving ourselves so far beyond our current potential as a democracy. The U.S. need it’s citizens to actually be committed to causes which they claim to support. People in the U.S. (including me) we need to become more informed about our own world and actually care about our country as much as we claim to and as much as we care about our friends and families.
In order to actually fix any of the many issues that plague the U.S. today we have to quit being pop protesters and actually commit to a cause we care about. It’s probably impossible to commit to every cause, so just pick one that actually matters and stick with it.
Fleeting Thoughts of a Bad Student 