Too Much Naval Gazing?

A writer on my fav feminist blog recently wrote a great post about the lessons we should have learned from the many school shootings America has experienced and why we never seem to learn them. At one particular point, she responds to the story of one shooter's obsession with his weight:

And this is where I really do wish we valued brains a little more in this country, because there REALLY SHOULD BE BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT. But the same way the first American Dream moved us all out to the suburbs only to strand us there alone with our cable and ice cream and placid lawns and sad fleshy dead-eyed moms who can't bother driving us anywhere, this new American Dream of fastidiously monitoring our intake and expenditure of energy units is really just another big distraction from the real problem...

As a blogger, this is an interesting question as blogging itself is exactly that; a way to "[monitor] our intake and expenditure." My dad always told me that my generation was full of "naval gazers," people so caught up in their own drama with their MySpace pages, blogs, cell phones, and reality T.V. that they'd never care, and that nothing of consequence...other than lint...would ever get accomplished or be found. As the world gets more and more complicated with encroaching fuel, food, financial, and climate crisis', and things become more and more corrupt yet separated from our daily lives by technology and consumerism, we want to get away and are desperately trying to find ourselves. We know something is missing but don't know where to look. But some people, like Colin at No Impact Man, the ladies (and gentlemen) at Jezebel, and Beth at Fake Plastic Fish are turning the sometimes overly personal, ever saccharine apparatus of blogging into a great tool to reach others and make a change, exposing the real problems facing us. What makes them different is that they aren't just telling us about the problems but are becoming the solution.