(May 24, 2011) — There was a tsunami that hit Japan a couple of months ago and it was all over the news. Also, oil leaked into some godforsaken gulf for a few months. Last year, a disastrous earthquake devastated a Caribbean island. Of course, none of these incidents matter anymore since there is no coverage of the disasters on the news channels. We assume that everything must be back to normal. When these events were going on, we watched the news religiously and read the papers fervently. Our lives were filled with ambivalent emotions, raging from sorrow to anger. We held fundraisers and prayed for those in trouble. And above all, we sent them relief. It was indeed entertaining. Watching the news in an impersonal fashion and yet fabricating a facade, as if we cared, was indeed a dazzling display of our talent. It was like one of those TV shows. “1000 dead bodies found today.” Let’s see how many they will find tomorrow. After a while, our interest started to dwindle — at least, the news corporations thought that we would go into a state of ennui from watching these repetitive reports — and they simply shut the coverage. How thoughtful of them! And we moved on with our lives. By the way, if you didn’t know already, the oil in the gulf just vanished by some miracle. The news corporations capitalized on the hapless happenings, and as soon as the “disaster was over,” they switched to something else. And we the audience of this great show just went along with that. We needed something refreshing; enough of those collapsed buildings! While the news was on, we pretended to care and when it ended, we pretended that everything was back to normal. It’s not personal, after all; it’s not like it happened here. Why should we care? We have enough to worry about like walking our dogs, trying to score high on the SAT, struggling to get into a prestigious college, watching our politicians pretend they’re solving our budget problems and most importantly, desperately following the gas prices as they go up. Pretending has become a mundane activity. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. However, one might care to ask, is the pretense unintentional and are we doing it because it has become a habit? Can it be rectified, or are we incorrigible pretenders? Has our society nurtured us in a way that we only care about what’s personal to us?