an economy of ignorance

on small town america and willful ignorance in the digital age

I grew up in a village just outside of the city of Milwaukee, WI called Germantown. Village Hall and the community library live in the same parking lot. Flags with messages like "Trump 2024" and "Fuck Biden" litter the lawns of the countless single-family homes. Red barns dot the landscape and cows graze on the endless stretches of prairie grass colored with wildflowers. Most every major street is decorated with churches and pubs.

In a place like Germantown, there is no breaking news, there is no political warfare, there is no perceived injustice—we don’t event have a local paper. There is however, the golf course, the custard shop, and a constant stream of polarized, sensationalized media coming in with no line out.

Here the days are long, lazy, and silent with the exception of the occasional passing cargo train or the hum of lawn mower blades running when every single person is doing their lawn at the exact same time for some reason. Capitalism has most of us in a chokehold so strong that it feels like there's no time to think beyond the 4 walls of our identical looking homes, the people inside them, and fresh cut blades of grass on the sidewalk.

I have never felt less connected to the world than when I'm here.

In the strip mall where the grocery store is there’s a gun shop. People talk about Trump like he’s an old drinking buddy, and brutality and oppression are treated like nuisance weeds.

Small, American towns like mine are sucked into a national narrative fueled by this very ignorance, a willingly imposed ignorance that keeps residents so preoccupied with chasing the “American dream” that atrocities easily fly under the radar.  

I've always considered myself socially engaged and concerned, which is why I initially pursued a degree in political science when I left for college. However, living in D.C. exposed me to the unsettling underbelly of politics and made me realize that politics would never be the way to make the change I sought. But I also found myself amongst others who saw it too, and were interested in speaking out and finding tangible solutions. My four years in school transformed my beliefs and radicalized my ideologies, after I fully grasped the urgency of the issues at hand.

Returning to Germantown over the past six months, I found myself slipping back into the docile mindset that this lifestyle promotes. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and the local news station rotate on my living room screen for the better part of the day, placing into my subconscious stories of terrorism, prejudice, and other narratives without context or history. Similarly photos of blurred bodies and fiery buildings become difficult to translate past the 2D images flashed haphazardly on the screen. Misinformed chatter overheard at the gas station and being the only color in a sea of pale faces becomes the norm.

Meanwhile, down the street, no one batted an eye when the basketball hoops mysteriously disappeared shortly after Black and brown kids started spending more time there, 15 miles south from here in Milwaukee the parks which children play at turn to war zones when the sun sets, and across the world there is a genocide taking place in occupied Palestine being masked as a war on terror.

I found myself slipping into ignorance too, a collective ignorance that benefits the wealthy and powerful, leaving the rest of us isolated and detached from our own communities and the entire world. Issues feel too far away and out of our hands and our neighbors turn into our adversaries.

And I wish the solution were as easy as telling people to get offline, turn off the news, read a book, and talk to real people. 

But then again, maybe it can that simple, at least as a starting place, so get off Instagram, turn off the news, read a book, immerse yourself in first-hand accounts, go outside, connect, and see for yourself. The world is happening to you as much as it is everyone else.

a note: this piece does’t even touch the surface of the issues i touched on but i encourage you to do your own reading and research on current events and the full scope of human rights issues. some news sources i do like are The Atlantic, ProPublica, and New York Magazine, but there is endless research and scholarly reading to be done on any issue imaginable.

And do donate to social justice and relief organizations using your own discretion!! one(of many)for instance: Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund