America is 'jolt' society

The Breeze editorial staff wonders why students have gone back to normalcy so quickly (four months) after Sept. 11. The reason is that we are a jolt society.

Now, I don't mean the soft drink. What I mean is that our lives move from one adrenaline rush to the next, or from one shock to another. On television, a jolt is any event that breaks the pattern of meaning, like a gunshot or a sudden cut to another view. In a simple way, we, the television society, have changed reality to be like fantasy.

A jolt is not always a bad thing. It can be an unexpected letter from Mom and Dad with a $100 bill nestled inside. We would all like a lot more of those. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a jolt as well, if anyone is looking for good earth-shaking jolts.

So why the return to normalcy? We're waiting for the next big jolt. Princess Diana's death jolted us so much that when Mother Teresa passed away the next week we barely blinked. When big jolts happen too fast, we don't keep up. We can handle, however, mild jolts, like wild parties about twice a week. Prozac can be a jolt we get used to every day, and a coffee jolt might happen three or four times a day.

Sept. 11 was a big jolt, though, and nothing has happened since then. Oh sure, we bombed the snot out of some caves and then let the Taliban and the Northern Alliance kill each other, but compared with hijacked flights and burning buildings, a minor skirmish like Afghanistan doesn't appear on our jolt screens. So we revert to normalcy, waiting for the next important news bulletin to give temporary meaning to our lives.

The better question to ask is: Why are we a jolt society? Some (like our moms) would say the reason is too much television and those video games from hell. I think the reality lies in what we are told we could be, but never really will. Let me explain.

We constantly see images of successful sports stars, elegant entertainers and powerful politicians. They are what we could be, only if. If we had more money, talent, connections or a better body, be it of the athletic or sexy variety. But we're not, or at least reality says we're not. We are the TV society, however, and we will make reality look like fantasy, or spend a lot of money and time trying. So we wear designer threads, work out and search for the perfect look, the perfect high and, of course, the perfect mate. We try to get to the top, but we'll settle for a jolt — an adrenaline boost so we can have, for a moment, an exciting life.

As recently as 70 to 80 years ago, our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't try to act like the wealthy in their society. They couldn't, they knew it, and they didn't worry about it. I don't know about the rest of the JMU student body, but my ancestors were farmers. They worked on other peoples' farms because there is no Sharp family farm, no ancestral estate. Life was slow and jolts were birthdays, weddings, funerals and when the barn burned. The world was out there, beyond the fence, except when war intruded to kick them out of Europe to continue the same life here in America.

I'll bet that most JMU students didn't come from millionaire families or noble lineages. Your ancestors may not have been farmers, but they weren't powerful or rich. We may not choose when we were born, but we can choose how we live. We can endlessly strive for the unattainable life through our jolts, or we can look for a better life, a life not based on comparison with the elite of our world but with what gives us self-fulfillment. There will always be jolts, true. They only matter so much when we need them to feel better.

Adam Sharp is a sophomore foreign language major who tries not just to survive, but to thrive without jolts — and loves it.