In a country that values seven hundred channels of cable television, eighty dollar pairs of jeans, instant juice makers, “super” department stores, and Starbucks Coffee, it’s time we face a harsh reality. We don’t care anymore. Nothing that happens seems to be able to keep anyone’s attention for more than a few minutes. We can’t even have normal news casts now. It has to be action news. Even worse, the news anchor has to be a busty young woman talking about bombings, mass murder, secret underground rave clubs, and freak microwave accidents, all while about a billion statistics, weather updates and abbreviated news headlines zoom across the top and bottom of the screen. And America still falls asleep with that on. We are bored.

So what can we do about it? First, I think, we have to realize that we’re way too far in to the problem to go back. There is no redemption; there is no hope for a cure. A fourteen year old girl attends a Christian rock concert with a guy friend of hers, and goes home pregnant. This is our America. We might as well get used to it, and often times, it seems as though we already are. We are desensitized. It takes quite a lot to make the average person feel anything. America has been punching us in the face since the day we were born, and its time to make a choice. Go to sleep with the approaching fist to the nose, or learn to like the taste of blood.

Sleep is boring, and there isn’t a thing America hates more than being bored.

Because of this, the nature of America, the question becomes, “What do we do to keep things interesting?” We could always free the animals in the zoo, or throw something at a passing car. Shoot anything that moves. If you’re a smart citizen, build the biggest, baddest killer-destructive robot you can conceive. After that, fill the robot with Chinese-star equipped ninjas. If your lack of mechanical intelligence prevents you from something so grand in scale, simply cut off the top of your car, buy (or better yet, steal) an eye patch, and drive around exclaiming “Arrrghh!” to anyone who happens to be taking an afternoon walk. Or, just hit a window with a baseball bat. Scream. That could keep things interesting for a while. Go out for milk and get attacked by gun and knife-toting squirrels riding giraffes. This, my fellow countrymen, could be the new America.

The land of the free and the home of the entertained.

Really, there’s not too much else we can do about it. People have tried. Stricter movie and music rating systems, parental controls, disturbingly overbearing censors, it’s no use. Blocking it all now wouldn’t change the fact that we’ve seen it before, and seeing less of it than we are all used to would only put us to sleep faster. There is no escape, no path, no return to innocence.

The question arises, though, is this all really a bad thing? I don’t know. With the way we live, infinite amounts of information available to anyone who looks for it at libraries, on television, in film, and on the internet, we’ve seen it all. Generations of visionaries and intellectuals have built this world for us, this country, this land of the free and home of the brave, and we have no idea what to do with it. Now that it is realized that the ideas of our forefathers have not and cannot be fulfilled, we are lost.

That being said, no one really ever knew what the American Dream was. It was always a fantasy, a fictional goal to work towards, an illusion of a better tomorrow. Today is our sad day when we realize the country we live in is the scatterbrained dreams of yesterday.

But we don’t really care, right? We just lounge around in our underwear eating Coco Blasters and watching “The Price is Right."

We are the product of the aimless American dream.

So here’s to us, the land of the free, and the home of the bored.

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