We have all seen reports of the college-aged students continuing to swarm the beaches in Florida while the COVID-19 virus spreads at an exponential rate. Schools are closed, workers are out of work, and people are dying. So why does this one segment of the population continue to ignore the warnings?
Its not because they are sociopaths. It’s because of their history. They’ve grown up in a world that has always had the internet. They have been exposed to nonstop fear-mongering both from the traditional media news outlets as well as the internet at large. They receive thousands of inputs a day, most designed to try to get them excited about something. Click this, buy that. As savvy consumers of digital information, they understand that 99.9% of the messages sent to them are complete bullshit.
There was a book read to me by my mother as a child: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I’m not sure if young people today are familiar with this, but anyone my age or older understands. If you scream that the world is ending over and over, you will eventually be ignored. That’s exactly what has happened.
Think about the news stories of the last year. Just one year. It has been nonstop fear. Politics, Russian hackers, Chinese business, Chinese military, criminal undocumented aliens from other countries. Disease, corporate pollution poisoning the environment. Plastic in the oceans. Species going extinct. Global warming. The national debt. Social security going bankrupt. Medical costs spiraling out of control. Student loan crisis. Mass shootings.
Imagine that you, personally, are in charge of a newspaper. Or a television network. How are you going to get people to read or watch? Are you going to report exactly what happened that day, with no commentary? No! You would be the most boring newspaper ever, and you would be unable to compete with HuffPost or Perez Hilton. So you sensationalize. Illegal immigrants are taking your jobs and committing crimes. Doctors are getting rich selling you unnecessary 3D mammograms. The Chinese are going to invade. And then you’ll get the coverage you want. But the only people who listen to these skewed reports are the people who want to hear them.
I feel like news was like science when I was young. It was truth. It was a true report of what had happened in the world. Now it’s a flavored entertainment program, designed to reinforce the viewpoint of whatever far end of the spectrum you occupy. Do you pride yourself on having accountability and a work ethic, and hate the concept of “welfare?” Watch Fox News. Are you convinced that the rich people are abusing the rest of us? Watch CNN. You will certainly have your natural beliefs fired up. Every report will be tailored toward your tastes. And there will be fear. Trump is destroying this country, the environment, and the economy. Bernie Sanders will take your hard-earned savings and give it to lazy people sitting at home on the couch. You’d better watch the next hour to see how bad it is. And you’d better take to Twitter and Facebook to scream about your personal beliefs and post memes supporting them.
It’s not just the college students who have learned to tune out the noise. I blew off the coronavirus until a couple of weeks ago. And I’m a physician! I paid little attention until I started seeing medical journal articles addressing the issue. That caught my attention and I began reading the reputable sources that I trust.
But teenagers don’t have that ability. They have’t yet learned to evaluate an information source. In medical school, we’re taught to break down a scientific paper, evaluate the methodology, and look for bias. How would a young person know how to do this? The answer is that they don’t. They just assume its all noise. And they’re almost always right.
Until now.
“So, Jason, what’s your point? What would you like to see happen?”
Well, obviously, I’d like to see honest, true non-sensationalistic news return. I want everyone to stop rewarding demagoguery. Stop watching Fox News and CNN. But I understand that isn’t going to happen. At least not anytime soon.
We need to teach young people what they can and can’t trust. How to do that? It takes a lifetime and a lot of work. Think about when you personally, as an educated adult, realized that the coronavirus was for real. No easy answers here.
But for now? Close the damned beaches. Close the restaurants and bars. Do what we always do when our kids misbehave. Take away the car keys. Lock up the booze. And close the beaches. Protect them from their little idiot selves.And also, just maybe just take it easy on the Spring Break Partiers. Don’t throw things and call them murderers. Because most of them are just kids. Are they selfish and shallow and obnoxious? Definitely. Are they murderers? I don’t think so.