Americentrism (in America)

America has a disturbing habit of making it all about us.

Hey guys. Remember ISIS? Yeah, neither do I. Apparently they were this big terrorism thing that happened a while ago. And you know what?

It’s still happening.

ISIS is still recruiting the angry or misguided youth of our nation. In fact, they’re using the Baltimore riots as a chance to recruit “dissatisfied” African Americans who harbor grudges against the American government for their treatment by the police force. They’re still staging public executions and releasing the videos. They’re still torturing civilians and performing forced amputations.

And yet, according to Google Trends, interest in ISIS over the past two months have dropped by almost 60%.

My question is: why?

Our society seems to have a habit of seizing on whatever’s in the news. We yell about it, say we’re outraged because everyone else is doing it. It’s part of a strange kind of herd mentality. And we may think we believe what we’re saying, but deep down it’s only because we don’t want to be social outcasts for disagreeing. And then, once the news story gets old, we drop it. Everyone forgets. It’s like it never happened, but in reality, the situation still exists, and it may even get worse.

The Islamic State Hacking Division recently released a document containing a hundred names of United States military personnel, entreating their “brothers residing in America” to kill them on sight. So far, there’s been very little public outcry. I didn’t even know about it until I went Googling for info for this article.  But there they are, 100 names of real people openly marked for death. I’m betting that they don’t even know.
But what I’m saying is, America seems to forget about every issue that doesn’t involve us. Once things lose their novelty, we get tired of it and move on to gripe about another issue. And this might be okay if we did something about it instead of just Tweeting about it from the safety of our homes. These are real issues, guys, not just some bandwagon to hop on. Don’t pretend to care about something if you’re not willing to do anything about it. And please, please take extremist organizations like ISIS seriously. You never know what could happen if you don’t.