Excited to death

Everything hinges on up-to-the-minute excitement these days. The Internet has made the new-and-improved product the forefront of what’s important in our consumer lives. Similarly, the 24-hour news cycle has become even further compressed with breathless coverage of the next new thing. We ride Google Trends and watch fads rise and fall in a week (see: Stuff White People Like blog).\nThis fast-moving culture has led us to roll our eyes at the boring but important forces that govern our world. Tax policy, infrastructure construction, financial regulations: all colossally boring, all colossally important. We ignore such boredom for the sake of shiny excitement at our own peril. Just look at the hiccupping economy and see why the dismal can affect us all.\nTake infrastructure, for instance. The last thing most people want to think about is their sewer system or the integrity of their highway bridges. Then, when everything goes wrong, the finger-pointing begins in earnest, only to vanish once the excitement has moved on. \nRemember when the I-35W highway bridge collapsed in Minnesota? For a week, the media couldn’t stop talking about how the nation’s infrastructure was collapsing. Then, silence. Now, a new bridge is being hastily constructed, while our nation’s bridges continue to squeak by inspections.\nIt’s not just falling bridges. Infrastructure is just one of America’s many structural problems. Our never-ending gridlock grows out of our continued treatment of cars as more important than people. Our urban sprawl grows out of our continued subsidies to aid the construction of ever-growing subdivisions, while ignoring our downtowns. Ignore the glittering construction projects and grand plans of urban renewal; the real image of our civilization is painted in the dull tones of concrete, asphalt and steel by dreary pencil-pushers who decide our futures.\nWho decides the bus routes? Or how many buses there should be? These questions aren’t exactly exciting, but they can mean the difference between a 10-minute trip to school or a 40-minute one. The changes that we notice the least can influence us the most.\nOur world is full of examples of the hip, exciting thing overshadowing the boring but important one. We watch endless clips of Sen. Barack Obama bowling and Sen. Hillary Clinton crying, but a dense, legalese memo from the Justice Department which made all of us torturers has flown under the radar because no one will sit through the 81 pages to read it. All the fist-pumping and flag-waving hubbub in the run-up to the Iraq War prevented members of Congress from even reading the intelligence report that detailed Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons. Our addiction to the Next Big Thing has blinded us to the small, tedious mechanisms that actually govern the lives we lead.\nI know Little 500 week is hardly the best time to bring up the importance of boredom, and I’m hardly innocent of this addiction, being an information junkie and adventure-seeker myself. Still, we can’t let our need for the new and exciting get in the way of the important. So, put down the beer bong, stop watching TMZ and think for a moment about something dull and uninteresting for once. You never know; you just might save the world.