Politics are toxic.
They’re boring, seemingly over-emphasized and certainly over-publicized in the media during any normal year. It’s even worse as we creep closer to the 2012 presidential election; even those that manage to consistently abstain from the collective political commentary find themselves being coerced into the conversation.
For these reasons and many more, college-age students often disconnect themselves with the national political issues at hand.
Who can blame them, right?
Despite the obvious need to prioritize academics, college has also always been a time for social expansion among other aspects of maturity. In other words, the latest legislation passed down from our nation’s policymakers is usually not the most prominent conflict in our lives.
But what we sometimes fail to realize is that our generation is standing on the precipice of an imminent and monumental political shift in our country. And by taking the initiative to remain proactively politically informed, our generation – along with our modern beliefs and ideals – will soon supplant those of our parents and other generations before us.
It’s a critical responsibility, despite the fact that so many young people take it so lightly.
The battle against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) have brought to light some of our generation’s capabilities to stand up against potential political injustices – especially through the means of the Internet – but have also highlighted some of our shortcomings.
For instance, the PIPA bill was introduced to the U.S. Senate last May, but it took nearly a year for public awareness about such a threatening piece of legislation to reach the point where policymakers finally had no choice but to pull the bill while they come up with a less-controversial way of targeting copyright infringement.
It was promising that such attention could be brought to a specific piece of legislation so quickly, where in less-democratic countries it would have almost certainly passed without even the possibility of debate, but regrettable in the sense that it took such a wide-scale campaign to raise awareness about a piece of legislation embedded with countless sacrifices of our basic civil rights entitled by the Constitution.
Despite the fact many are now “basking in the glory of victory” over SOPA and PIPA, the truth is the battle for enforcing copyright infringement is far from over. The only way to ensure we can continue to effectively drive back similarly restrictive legislation is to remain proactively informed and at least somewhat politically involved.
This responsibility applies to older generations as well – before the widespread Jan. 18 blackouts by a multitude of websites (Google, Wikipedia, etc.) caught the attention of the national news, hardly anyone I had talked to over the age of 40 was familiar with either SOPA or PIPA, or how it in anyway affected them.
Too often, our society depends on these major media outlets to keep us up-to-date and informed on critical, developing national news. This is simply a misappropriation of responsibility.
Each voting individual in our society is responsible for gathering their own information about our nation’s policies to make informed, independent decisions.
That doesn’t mean I’m prescribing you to engage in thorough political discussion on a daily basis or to go scouring through heaps of political legislation looking for that one minor civil injustice someone else might have missed.
It just means that part of our collective responsibility as American citizens is being educated enough on the political process and new laws that are being introduced in order to continue to improve collective social conditions and keep lawmakers in check.
Admittedly, it’s easier said than done.
But a concerted effort by a majority of our generation to become more politically aware could literally turn the tide in American politics, beginning to shift policies and bring about a more agreeable status quo for the future.