Our world continues to progress on so many levels. On the forefront of progress seems to always be technology. In many ways, we are now part human, part machine. To work, we type. To talk, we type and text. To play, we press buttons on a joystick and stare at screens. As a result of continuous electronic stimulation, many have noted that we as a society are becoming desensitized to emotion. One of those emotions in which this is most true, in my opinion, is pain. We get exposure to others’ pain in manners that have no true consequence for our personal lives - such as through movies and video games. In fact, if you “die” in a video game, you can come right back to life.
Many schools, helicopter parents, and societies do a great job of sheltering our kids from true pain - while giving them plenty of outlets for observing pain without consequence. For a student that has never personally experienced true suffering, like hunger, violence, incurable disease, or death, it is very easy to downplay the effects of harmful actions in the real world. However, when you take those students and challenge them to think outside of their community-created bubbles, in environments such as the Global Studies course that is a foundation for the Elon general studies program, an important paradigm shift occurs. Students learn that the makings of this world are much more complicated and with many more consequences than they had previously considered, and the poor and suffering that come as a result of apathy, misplaced resources, and hatred are experiencing true pain, right now. Negative emotions will come as a result, such as anger of living a sheltered life, guilt and shame of exploiting the riches in this world solely for personal gain, fear of the eternal consequences of doing too little to help out.
It is the job of the Periclean Scholars program to turn these negative emotions into positive actions. Rather than anger for living a sheltered life, students’ minds can be soothed by the opportunity to create a project of positive global consequence. Rather than feeling guilty and shameful for using past riches solely for personal gain, students can explore avenues to use their time, talents, and resources for the common good. Rather than fearing what will happen for not doing enough in the past, they can vow to turn things around and make helping others into an important life priority.
There is an important gap here. If we do not allow students the opportunity to explore positive means of expression after bursting their bubbles, they will grow angry, cynical, and disengaged. When people see or hear about bad things being done with real consequences, their primal instinct is to find a solution. If the only message that they hear is that their efforts are fruitless or inconsequential, then their negative feelings will be magnified. Even worse, if people never learn about others’ pain and what is truly going on in the real world, they will never have the opportunity to experience that paradigm shift. This could mean that they cause suffering for others through ignorance or through mimicking acts they witness in the digital environment. This is the trend that Project Pericles as a whole aims to fight.
The world continues to move forward technologically - but we must give its citizens the opportunity to make a difference in the real world, lest we move backwards.
This is reason #21 to support Periclean Scholars: To provide an outlet to work toward positive solutions after learning of others’ pain.
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