Last March, 663,000 Americans lost their jobs. On April 3, 14 individuals were shot in Binghamton, N.Y., at an immigrant services center. On Monday, 260 civilians perished as a result of the earthquake that shook L'Aquila, Italy.
Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television, and it seems that the only news that we see is bad news. Tragedy after tragedy continues to make headlines. Bad news is the first thing we hear when we wake up in the morning, and the last thing we hear before we go to sleep at night.
Even though we are constantly surrounded by the knowledge of these horrific events, it is still easy to become emotionally detached from them. I, for one, have not lost my job, and thankfully, nor has anyone in my family. Not only have I never visited Italy before, I also don't know any of the individuals who died from the devastation of the recent earthquake. Whether it is a country as far away as Italy, or the city of Binghamton, which is less than five hours from the UConn, it is safe to say that we, in our little Storrs bubble, remain largely unaffected.
Children are kidnapped, tsunamis destroy cities and unemployment rates are worse than ever. It seems that our brains are now automatically programmed to respond to unfortunate news. We hear about something terrible that has just happened, feel bad for a nanosecond and then we are able to breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't us. As quickly as a historic town in Italy is able to crumble to pieces, we are able to go back to watching a rerun of "Rock of Love," safe within the comforts of trashy reality television and Bret Michaels' bad hair extensions.
But that's not reality. In reality, we have become immune to the catastrophes of the world. We feel sorry, we commiserate and we climb that bridge known as "I Have My Own Problems To Worry About." We somehow manage to successfully get over it every day. Is it because we truly do not care about what is going on outside the realms of our personal lives, or could it be that we simply feel that we cannot do anything about the all-too-frequent injustices of the world? For the sake of optimism, I'm going to go with the latter.
It's true. We do not have the power, money, or resources to right all the wrongs of the world. It is not possible to prevent earthquakes from starting, nor is it possible to give each of those 663,000 Americans a job to the replace the ones they have lost last month. However, we do have the power to do small things that can have a significant impact. Last weekend, I was at Fairfield University visiting a friend and participated in Hunger Cleanup, where the entire campus was encouraged to participate in community service projects both on and off campus. A group of us drove to a nursing home in nearby Bridgeport where we cleaned windows outside for two hours in the drizzling rain. Despite being wet and cold, we not only had the best time singing Disney songs while scrubbing windows, but seeing the smiles of the patients reflected as they watched us from the inside was more than gratifying.
The world can be a pretty depressing place. It's a definite struggle of balance in terms of being aware of its daily tribulations, while not allowing them to consume our optimism. We can begin to restore that optimism through our small-scale efforts. By washing windows, planting a few trees at a local park, or doing a load of laundry for a roommate, we can make our own environment a little bit brighter when is appears that nothing else is.
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