The problems of the world are far larger than we choose to believe.
As college students, it is very easy to sit back and say that we feel sorry for countries going through turmoil and children fleeing for their lives, because we are not the ones going through it.
We sit on our phones, read the news and say to ourselves, “oh wow, another person died. What a sad world we live in.”
The problem with this way of thinking is that no action is being taken.
Typing 140 characters worth of our opinions and putting it on twitter will not provide a home for a refugee that is fleeing for their life.
Changing our Facebook photos to a silhouette of the Paris flag can not bring back the lives of those that were taken by sick, twisted suicide bombers.
Why do we feel the need to broadcast our sorrows on social media? To show our followers that we have a heart? To show others that we know what is going on in the world? The fact of the matter is that we think that we know what is going on, but we can only sympathize.
Our generation is extremely infatuated with social media and our phones. According to Pew Research, 68 percent of smartphone users use their phones to follow along with breaking news, while 33 percent of these users say that they do it quite frequently.
The truth is that we do not understand what it feels like to have our home countries torn apart and being completely helpless to what is going on.
We have the nerve to sit on our couches and blame Syrian Refugees for the Paris bombings when, in reality, most refugees are women and children and refugees are not a part of ISIS. We think we know what is going on, when we really have no room to talk.
We turn on the news to hear Donald Trump saying that he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” When did these type of comments become acceptable? Especially from someone who wants to run our country? And when did it become okay to type a quick tweet of, “Donald Trump is so stupid” then hit send? Oh yeah, we sure showed him.
Instead of posting tweets about feeling sorry for the African American boy that was shot 16 times, why can’t we do something about it?
We live in a world where going to sporting events or walking down the street is something that we find ourselves doing with that little drop of fear in the back of our minds without us thinking twice about it.
We live in a world where our generation is fearful in times when they have the right to feel comfortable. We have lived through the Columbine shooting and September 11, 2001, which according to the Huffington Post, influenced our generation’s fears and had an impact on millennials’ political identifications and affiliations” and makes us feel more skeptical at times.
We should not feel as if we need to put our opinions out there on social media for others to know that we are sympathetic for the events that are happening in the world. What we do need to feel responsible for, however, is standing up for what we believe in and taking action. We are the millennial generation and we have the world at our fingertips. If we do not take a stand for what we believe in and take action, who will?
So, go ahead. Have that conversation with your parents as to why you think the world needs help. Write a letter to Congress stating your beliefs. Join a protest, make a phone call, spend some time volunteering. And, whatever you do, put down your smartphone, because feeling sorry just is not helping.
