Libya over Lindsay

In one of my classes the teacher asked us to come up with a slogan that represented our generation. The room fell silent until someone half jokingly said something about ignorance. People contributed a smattering of other ideas but the first really stuck out to me, and suddenly I started to realize: It's the sad truth.

Before I came to Richmond and chose journalism as a major, I didn't read the newspaper and I barely watched the news on TV, except to catch a few minutes of "Access Hollywood." Thus, I'm not holding myself up as Ms. Informed. But once my classes started requiring me to actually take a look at The New York Times every day, I was embarrassed to find out how much information I was missing.

It was a revelation for me. Just skimming the headlines each day suddenly allowed me to gain perspective on the tiny bubble I had been living in since high school and even to see outside of it to the immense world around me.

I could actually carry on a knowledgeable conversation and know what I was talking about, instead of shrinking into the background and letting the "informed" people do the talking.

When the uprisings began in North Africa and the Middle East, it became apparent just how little students around me knew about what was happening. They only started to get the basic gist when it flashed across news screens day after day for weeks.

Even with our own involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan -- news that should be extremely relevant -- I don't think many of us could even begin to articulate why we're there except for a brief reference to 9/11 and Bin Laden.

The problem is rooted in our media. Just looking at CNN's homepage right now, the main story is "Nuclear threat level raised." OK. But then the very next featured story is called "Ask Kate Hudson, John Krasinski," and it's an interview with these celebrities about their newest movie. Further down "France's burqa ban takes effect" -- which, in the scheme of things, is a fairly large deal -- is right next to "Lohan's Betty White smackdown." Really, CNN? Under that, the first video in the TV clips category is "Dr. Drew: Advice for Lohan's Dad."

OK. I understand celebrities' lives are extremely important. They are by far more important than our own, and it's definitely necessary to put everything on hold to live vicariously through them.

But in all seriousness, this proves my point. This is why people don't know the depth of what's happening in Libya, because the story on Lindsay Lohan's 48th rehab trip is right next to it. The colored pictures of Lindsay crying through her mascara look much more appealing than photos of people shaking their fists at some rally halfway across the world.

In reality, though, if we actually step back and take a look at this, it's pathetic. What's going to matter more in 10 years: the fact that the Egyptian youth were able to topple their government by pure, unified force? Or Lindsay's cocaine habits? If that still doesn't make the answer obvious, I'm sure Lindsay will be doing the same thing in 10 years, so why not read about something that could be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence?

In the same class where we were asked to come up with the slogan, we discussed how the real images of violence and death during the Vietnam War were constantly flashed across T.V. screens. We even watched a short documentary that depicted bodies being thrown into a helicopter net and protesters being beaten bloody. With the Afghanistan/Iraq war, we never see images like this.

We talked about how our government today tries to censor these images because they incited protesters during the Vietnam War, and people are scared of the same result for the current war.

However, this censorship only adds to our already accumulating ignorance. We're a visual generation, so we would pay more attention to worldly issues if we were allowed to see more images of what was actually going on.

Although I understand that Iraq and Afghanistan are very different from Vietnam and there's much less hand-to-hand combat, there has to be more than just the endless pans of sand dunes and people crouching that we see every day.

It's sad to say that we need to see more blood to care about the war, but honestly, it may be the truth. We need a glimpse of some close-up and personal images to understand the magnitude of what's going on. If we're already fed images of cracked out celebrities stumbling out of cars and "accidentally" exposing their private parts, why can't we get such close-up salacious shots of things that actually matter?

I'm not even sure if it's just our generation that's ignorant to our world today. I'm sure there is a fair share of adults who could not talk in an informed way about these things, so maybe it's the generation before us that led us down this path.

Whatever the reason, they probably aren't going to change, and the media almost definitely isn't going to change, but we can.

We may never be the youth rebelling in Egypt, but we can rebel just a little by clicking on their story instead of on Lindsay's. If knowledge is power, do we really want to be known as the ignorant generation?