C-SPAM.

When I was a kid, I wanted to know things.

I wanted to know things so badly that I would beg my parents to buy me every available book on whatever topic was my current weekly indulgence. As a result, I was left with enough literature on UFOs, the Titanic and the birth of Hershey's chocolate that my room doubled as a library of culturally significant texts. 'Culturally significant' in this case means 'important to an 11-year-old' and 'texts' means 'whatever was available at our elementary school's book fair'. But their were numerous works that I would force my family to buy, building myself a collection that slowly began to detour from what the goal originally was: to know things.

I became so overly pre-occupied with having every available piece of information that, somewhere along the line, actually learning that information become somewhat secondary. (Note: this is true for all cases except my obsession with UFOs. That I was all about. It got to the point that I would recite the three different types of 'Close Encounters' with UFOs to anyone willing to listen. Sadly, at the age of 11, every adult near you is considered 'willing to listen'. On the bright side, if there is ever an alien attack of any sort, most of Marin County's adult population should know what to do. You're welcome, America)

The other day, I was speaking to my uncle about politics, which, after college and sports (the latter of which is never a topic I care about discussing - I call football soccer, and war crimes football) is the default conversation for any adult and a 20-year-old. He began to tell me of his apprehensiveness in regards to discussing politics in this day and age - that apprehensiveness was nowhere to be found at around minute 45 of our 'discussion' (read: monologue). He began to recount the days in which politics was more than just a topic, it was a national pastime. A president's speech was the highlight of the year's telecasts; a news anchor would speak to the country, becoming a one-man explanation of all things too heavy to comprehend; the passing of a public figure was accompanied by an anticipated remembrance speech.

But these days, a president's speech is all but forgotten about, until the next day's inevitable "Oh yeah, I heard about that"'s. The anchors are divided by ideologies, with one making you feel scared, and the other making you feel guilty. And did anyone notice President Obama's farewell speech to Sen. Ted Kennedy just this past week? Anyone? Bueller?

But what struck me most was my uncle's belief that the people don't care about politics (if that's even true) because they aren't being told anything. It's a lack of access, he claimed, that is responsible for the apathy of two generations: one that use to throw rocks and now sit in the corner offices making the same decisions they lamented, and one that reads about those very hypocrisies, and uses it as leverage in their overwhelming decision to stay stagnant.

At first, I agreed. As I've stated many times, we'll start caring about the world when there is a world being passed down worth caring about. That, or just let us know what the hell is going on.

Then, the other day, a couple friends and I were dissecting the goal and disposition of our 24-hour news networks: FOX News, the loud mouth conservative base; MSNBC, the loud mouth liberal younger brother, just screaming louder so that other people will notice. CNN, the more grounded and middle-minded of the networks. And then we got to a little diddy I always manage to forget about: C-SPAN.

What the hell. Is up. With C-SPAN?

It suddenly came flashing back to me. 2o years of living - 10 of cultural consciousness - later, and I suddenly remembered how often I would be skipping through channels only to hit C-SPAN and always, I repeat, always, wonder what the fuck I was watching. It was either a never ending frame of the White House lawn or a fountain, or a blue screen that scribbled programming that I swear they never played, all acompanied by a far too sultry and slightly too sleepy female voice, reminding me that, if I was ever to forget, I was watching C-SPAN.

Oh, and it would also stream non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs. So the other day, when reminded that C-SPAN existed, I made a point of watching it. And it struck me in a completely different light. Here it was: constant access to the events taking place behind closed political doors. No, not total access to everything, and no, not all interesting (although watch long enough and you're bound to catch some screaming - it's like the Real Housewives of D.C.), but it was there. We were given access to watch the more minutia heavy moments of public politics and cultural discourse take place.

And no one gave a damn. Not my uncle, not my friends, not even me.

In the Bay Area bubble, where to play any game that deals with counting the number of Prius' you see will end in numbers too high for comprehension, it's easy for me and others to forget about the reality of our political landscape. Adults preach, kids bitch and we all just slap some quasi-funny-but-not-really bumper sticker on our hybrids that make some sort of pun out of Dick and Bush (apparently, Marin also doesn't believe in upping its humor quotient - maybe it's due to our President finally being a badass).

But that belief, that to remain apathetic to any sort of political consciousness is logical because we're constantly kept in the dark, is, I'm sorry to say, bullshit. Because we are no longer in the dark ages. But we're also not in the Enlightenment age either. We're in the information age, where everything we need to know is feasibly at our fingertips. The death of the single broadcaster, the printed press, the need to be knowledgeable is not due to apathy, but excess. With so much information, we've devalued what it means to be informed. The same way broadcasters don't deem it necessary to divert from the shock doctorate. The same way that my friends and I find it satisfactory to label the outlets with what they produce as opposed to provide.

The same way I forgot to read about all the books I bought as a kid. It's the same mentality: the desire to have and to consume overtakes the desire to learn and comprehend. Maybe it's a mix of both of distraction and procrastination. Our desire to be up-to-date has more to do with the source of the information than the information itself. The latest blog to be in-the-know about holds more panache by the watercooler than any of the facts the blog posts. But it's also the knowledge that the facts are there, and there's no rush to get to them. They won't disappear if we don't buy them from the newsstands - they'll be archived. They won't go unseen if we don't catch the broadcast - it'll be on youtube. But in the time between 'wanting to know' and 'taking the time to learn', there is indifference, unfulfillment, annoyance.

The uncles of the world complain about no longer being in the know, even though we're now, more than ever, able to access information at dizzying speeds. What it now takes is the willingness to spend time. Because there is a disconnect that has inevitably grown in the Internet age, and it's deteriorated any cultural center of discourse, leaving no singular stream of information. We're on our own, because we wanted it that way. We made our bed, and now we have to let the C-SPAN lady's voice doze us into sleeping in it.