Sunday night was the MTV music awards aka the VMA's. Last year the highlight was One Direction kissing Katy Perry and breaking their Moon-Man. This year was a bit more chaotic. First off, Justin Timberlake and his boyband NSYNC had a revival and performed their song "Bye Bye Bye" causing every NSYNC fan to go ballistic. Heck, I was too little to pay attention to NSYNC when they were big, but even I was excited.
And then there was the train wreck that was Miley Cyrus with Robin Thicke. I would show you a picture but trust me, you really don't want to see that. Let's just say it elicited reactions like this:
as well as a priceless one by Taylor Swift, who looked like she was watching Paranormal Activity. The performance basically consisted of Miley singing, twerking, and sticking her tongue out in a way that I think was supposed to be sexy but didn't really work all while half naked. And teddy bears. Lots and lots of teddy bears. *shudder*
It caused an even bigger stir than Lady GaGa in a thong.
In the midst of all this, you may not have heard about some other, much more serious things going on. It was brought to my attention by a friend on Facebook that the United States could be sending a missile strike to Syria as early as this Thursday.
Another Facebook friend posted this picture yesterday
Truth be told, I hadn't even heard that churches were being burned in Egypt, and according to an article on newsbusters.org, there's probably a reason for that. Big news stations have given it anywhere between fifteen seconds and five minutes of air time. Five minutes may seem like a lot, but not when you consider that some of these shows are two hours long. Full article here
I've seen lots of complaints on Facebook about how Miley's dancing is getting more attention than serious political issues, and while I agree with their opinions, I think there are definite reasons for what we care about and what we seem to ignore.
Firstly: What is it that we see all the time? We see celebrities and gossip and who has the "best beach bod." That's what the media feeds us because that is what is entertaining and when they don't, we turn off the tv because we don't want to hear about all the bad things going on in the world. Yesterday I was watching an episode of the show The West Wing where there were all sorts of crises going on and all the reporters cared about was what the First Lady was going to wear to a state dinner. And this show came out in 1999, so obviously times haven't changed that much.
Secondly: We don't want to hear it. That's a huge part of the issue, I think. We ignore it because it's sad or hard to understand and we just don't want to think about it if it doesn't affect us directly. We want to be blissfully ignorant.
Thirdly: Maybe this is just me, but I never actually hear about big issues until people get mad that no one is focusing on them. And then they get angry because there are serious things going on in the world and all we care about is, for instance, how excited we are about NSYNC or how disturbed we are by Miley Cyrus. But at the same time, there are always bad things happening in the world and it's impossible to focus on all of them and it's so much easier to talk about celebrities.
Anyway, I don't think I gave many solid answers in this post but I just needed to talk about it. Because I feel personally that I am not ignoring the fact that churches are being burned. It actually concerns me quite a bit. The problem is that I didn't hear about it. And that is a big problem.
Anyway, I need to start my homework. I've procrastinated long enough.
Lisa
P.S. If you are on of those people from Facebook that I mentioned, I'm not attacking you. Actually if it weren't for you I wouldn't know about this so really I'm thanking you.
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