Apathy Redefined

The other day I was talking with a friend who said that our peers on the Auraria Campus are too apathetic in showing care for the greater good of others. She felt that, and she made her case, that the college students are too inundated with people with their hands out, and this in turn, creates the laziness or the indifference for political action. She believed that this “laziness” is why those of us involved in social justice are frustrated, while another friend of mine stated similarly that the reason for student apathy was that were too many causes, too little time, or simply too many people asking for money as well, and that the students simply “tune out” because they are overwhelmed.

As a non-traditional working student, I had to agree with my friends’ assessment, but I felt and think that there is more. This is not the dictionary sense of apathy – it is an over saturation of the students’ consciousness. An over saturation of awareness, in that, the colleges on the Auraria Campus: Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the University of Colorado Denver, are awakening critical thoughts in young and old minds alike. This awareness brings forth, in its initial forays, a fanaticism that is not sustainable but in a very special few.

In the young, a formation of their ideology and philosophy begins to take shape and a sense of whom and what they want to be is formed, with the opening of their minds. These young minds are bombarded with new information. Many of the students on the campus for the first time are seeing themselves through the eyes of marginalized and disenfranchised. They are “meeting them” instead of “viewing them” through the media and the “interwebs.”

And, although the “interwebs” has surpassed the expectations of providing access to information, and, has in a very real sense, created a hyper reality. A hyper reality layered in fact, fiction, fantasy, and outright lies. The interwebs cannot provide the experience of actually meeting the “person” in person or provide the actual experience of doing. Other than sight and sound, the entity, the idea, or the symbol that shapes ideas is filtered. Therefore, the information age and the interwebs have created a false sense of empathy and understanding, which cannot be fully realized. The intangibility of experience cannot be shared in the fullness of ones senses.

In the older students, the cynicism of experience taints political action and creates the apathy. Yet, as one of the older students on campus, I have felt compelled to pass along my life experience and share with others are how my own inaction has contributed in keeping in place the social injustices that surround me. Failing to speak the truth and speak out on the issues of the marginalized and disenfranchised contributed to my own apathy—and in spite of everything—I am still an optimist. I have a seen change and history in motion with the election of the first African-American president, the passage of healthcare, and the largest economic downturn in my lifetime. And despite human nature, humanity and evolving American attitudes (despite the recent noise of the political far right) is moving forward in its beliefs and philosophies. The Information Age has enabled people greater access to information and knowledge than ever before—and the speed in which this knowledge is obtained has benefited the average person.

Admittedly, the Information Age also, along with the media, has changed the dynamic in proffering how the individual receives their information. Taking action is now relative to the amount of noise one can generate on the web and able to sift through. However, some believe that there is still an information gap, and, how people access this information is relevant to their desire to seek it out. Leaving no excuses for the individual not to be informed. Nevertheless, there seems to be a relative relationship to access and apathy. The more an individual is engaged or disengaged the more or less the political awareness. With students, the amount of information absorbed beyond the book learning can generate much exhaustion.

The exhaustive amount of information that bombards students, while attending school, inherently places them in the state of paralysis. Students become seemingly unable to take action because they are overwhelmed with schoolwork, and, in much of the Auraria Campus schools cases, jobs and careers, and family duties. The students’ demographic on Auraria places them in a rare category of academic, urban and political activity. The bottom line is that student apathy is only part of the dynamic in which students fail to take action in the matter of social justice, again with the exception of a very special few, this apathy is more about feeling overwhelmed, over consumed, and over saturated in a hyper reality world than about laziness and cynicism.