OCTOBER 7, 2024 – Today, of course, marks the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israelis, a beastly assault and hostage-taking operation that triggered the vengeful destruction of lives and property in Gaza in the latest cycle of violence between Israel and its enemies. Forever, it seems the best that American policy-makers can do is continue sending aid and weapons to Israel while chanting, “A ceasefire needs to happen now.” Who knows how much cursing of Netanyahu has been happening offline in the West Wing, Foggy Bottom and even the Pentagon over the past six months or more, but so far the Biden Administration hasn’t issued a deadline or an ultimatum. Yet Netanyahu has made it clear that he (along with Putin, Xi and Kim Jung Eun) hopes that Biden’s predecessor will be Biden’s successor.
A curious aspect of the whole sordid mess is the silence among the student protesters who demonstrated such outrage last spring. Roughly a quarter of them would have graduated, however, and another quarter are fresh to the college campus scene, so an institutional memory, as it were, applies only to half the student population that had been so incensed six months ago. And as members of a #MeNow culture, no doubt a good number of this remaining cohort have since moved on to other mass distractions—such as college football.
I don’t mean to single out undergraduates. Where have the rest of us been?
Answer: hurricanes and . . . football . . . and this being October (and I myself being a baseball fan), I should add MLB playoffs, culminating soon with the World Series. Oh, yes. And the presidential election campaign, which, of course, coincides with U.S. House and Senate elections and local races as well, though media and advertising exposure of the prexy contest exceeds coverage of “lesser” campaigns by a ratio of a gazillion to 1.
Our fickle attention spans are a blessing and a curse; a blessing because impatience keeps us oriented toward the future and renders us more resilient because we’re not stuck in the muck of collective memory, but the same attribute is a curse since we can’t focus deeply enough to discuss meaningful policy options for long-fermenting problems. This double-edged sword is part of our cultural DNA—so powerful that it eventually absorbs all newcomers to the country. Accelerated by the impulsivity of our digital interactions, our collectively short attention span remains ascendant despite a vastly altered world economic, geopolitical and technological landscape that requires just the opposite—focused deliberation.
This election cycle scares me more than any before it; not only because the unthinkable outcome now seems as probable as the other, but because the process leading up to the day of reckoning is revealing that in the main, we voters have little to no inclination or aptitude for understanding the depth, breadth and complexity of issues that we face as a nation and that are most likely to define us retrospectively. Our diminished capacity for complexity is closely related to our short national attention span
Having long forgotten what Russia has done to Ukraine, we’re in danger of forgetting the unmitigated disaster that has followed October 7. In the good ol’ days, sky-rocketing oil prices might have attracted—and increased the duration of—our attention, but in today’s world, oil markets have barely blinked. Sudan and Burkina Faso? Most Americans couldn’t locate either country on a world map. Or Taiwan, for that matter, which, if you’ve noticed, has largely escaped mention in any campaign, Democrat or Republican. Know, however, that President Xi hasn’t forgotten about it, just as Putin hasn’t lost interest in Ukraine. The bad guys have attention spans that are getting longer as ours get shorter.
What is the answer? I’m not sure, but it might start with putting down the phone and picking up . . . a book.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
