For the past ten years of my life I’ve been paying attention to American politics and the response people have to the people in positions of power. It started when my mentor at my college, Senator Maggie Glover, took me under her wing and started to guide to academic greatness. Through her she ensured that as many of her students as possible had the chance to meet Senator Barack Obama as he was touring and gathering support for his first election. It was awesome to meet someone who made history. At the same time he turned this nation on it’s head in disbelief. From that point on I really started to take note of peoples behaviors and words.

After Obama’s election I had a few teachers, at an HBCU, Not show up to work for a few days. These teachers advocated for the opposition. I was young, but I was never naive enough to think that it was just because they were republican born and bred. They were opposed to an African American being in the greatest seat of power in this nation. Since they needed a job, they danced around how they spoke about him, eventually choosing to not speak about him at all. When you locked eyes with him though you could still see the rage and disgust though.

Fast forward to 2018 and the world has literally gone to shit as some would say. This is because people have become Desensitized yet overly sensitive about civil, moral, and political subject matter. It seems the art of debate has been lost, and the act of having screaming matches has taken over.

Desensitization 

The Desensitization has come about in my opinion due to the explosion of social media. Now everyone and their mother can rant and rave about what they don’t like and find thousands of followers who believe the same. Social media has done wonders for giving the masses a voice and a platform to SCREAM OUT LOUD about how they feel. Now we have entire Facebook and Twitter pages dedicated to opinions, whether they be laced with facts or not.

Now this platform has been turned volatile at this point, and it gets worse because every single day an act of violence, murder, hate crime, racism, prejudice, etc gets shared on there multiple times. After seeing that much pain, suffering, and just immoral behavior constantly the masses get desensitized to it. It is almost expected now every time one logs into their social media accounts.

That is a little broad so lets dig a bit deeper. Now the members of a race/ethnicity/sexual preference will be constantly shown negative acts towards them and subconscious accept that this is their world. On the other side of that people see that happen all the time and accept that it is happening to them constantly so it must be their fault, since they aren’t like me. Surely, they have done something to deserve this. Now this breeds a culture of people who just don’t care when injustice happens. We just keep on scrolling. (I don’t mean all people are like this, but we are starting to see more and more people who are.) 

Overly Sensitive 

This is a category of people we all know too well. Its the people who instantly take whatever you post about and tell you that your are wrong for posting it or hurting their feelings for it. Every act the world does is an act against them. Have you noticed that they only feel this way if their beliefs are infringed upon though? They become charged if what they view as right is spoken ill of.  Now lets take into account what I said earlier about being desensitized to certain things they see, and it gives you the full scope of the people we have to deal with on the regular.

These people won’t bat an eye at something that doesn’t directly pertain to them or mock the values that they hold dear. The moment you say anything to them, or just post something on social media that goes against what they believe they will cry out as a victim and retaliate. In recent times, we all can agree that most of these fires are started when peoples political, racial, or civil rights views are in question. People fight for their political parties all the time. We all it bickering, they call it congress. At the same time people will always stand and fight for Racial equality, but the other side of the coin is people fighting for racial injustice. You’re naive if you don’t see that.

Its just taxing as hell to deal with in our daily lives. On a personal level its hard to walk around with all my views and passions and have to keep them bottled up because I have to be strong, or I don’t want the atmosphere around me to be charged. I have to keep my mouth shut so I’m not stereotyped as the Angry Black Man, or the Woke Negro. I don’t claim to be either, I’m just aware of the world around me. After a while I will break and say something openly about how I feel on a situation. Once I do it will be backed with facts and said in a none aggressive way, but even that is seen as an attack and a battle will erupt. That is the part that kills me, that’s why I’m writing this now. Politics and other things have turned Americans into Desensitized yet overly sensitive beings of emotions. Those emotions are usually rage served up with a sizable dose of judgment.

I honestly don’t know if anything can be done for us as a nation. We’re encouraged to have opinions, but apparently it better be the “Right” opinion or you’ll be condemned for it. I have to walk around devoid of most emotions, play the part of the smile with sarcasm just to cope with the world. With the way that the world is set up if I do much more than that I’m frowned upon and told that I’m a problem. But am I really? Or is what I have to say just different from what you believe, so you’re lashing out at me? Think on that…

-Poetic Ice