About Now!

There are multiple issues going on around the world which is catching buzz. Some of these issues include current President of the USA Obama’s move to take a verdict from the Congress on the war against Syria, Fukushima’s radiation water leak, Ben Affleck as the new Batman and Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance. Now, you must be thinking how the latter issues are catching the buzz. Let me summarize that in two words; POP CULTURE.

No, not the pop culture of the 80’s and the 90’s which was dominated by the west but the pop culture that flourishes because of the global village i.e. the Internet. From Internet memes to social structures changing movements; everything has turned into a pop culture movement. If you do not belong to the pop culture you used to be called different. Now they call you a “Hipster”.

Frankly, I tried to look up the word in Oxford dictionary. I did not get a thing to understand and I do not understand it as well. While we are on the subject of words in the Oxford dictionary, this year two more words made into the dictionary. They are “selfie” and “twerking”. These words are so foreign to me that right now while I am typing these words in the old laptop of mine, the Word program is making a red underline underneath these words. If you understood, that means these words had no meaning until we used them. This happened after the boom of cheap handheld cameras.

See, the problem is not with pop culture itself. The problem is what we are doing with our world. The issues of radiation leak and war are less important than an actor playing a comic book character. Even Mackelmore’s speech regarding human rights in VMA’s was less important than Miley Cyrus’s performance. These trends do show that we have less regard of the important issues in the world. This is not going to stop as well. Our children and their children will follow our footsteps and I fear that someday our world is going to decay like Gotham from The Dark Night Trilogy (I made a movie reference and it’s getting me as well).

So, what do we do now? My solution is to read books, remain intelligent and hope that the pop culture will just be like that song “Gangnam Style” last year. It was fun while it lasted but it was just plain stupid.