America is a land of social trends, from silly bands to pizza rolls, we live in the now. But eventually all social trends end, and are forgotten as quickly as they became popular, even the ones that really mater.

When was the last time we heard about Palestine and Israel on the news, or Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ebola, how about the Superbowl? We are a country with a bad case of attention deficit, meaning someone could jingle their keys and we would forget that 12 people were shot dead in France over some comics.

It’s not like we don’t care, there is what looks like a passion for the subject for a while, we protest, we share links, we use hash-tags. Then, poof, it’s gone, and we’ve moved on to the next major headline while the others are pushed to the side.

George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin is currently in headlines again for throwing wine. Wine.

It’s not only the media’s fault, people eat this stuff up and the media knows that. Recently the Today show, which has over 1.4 million viewers, added a newscaster named Wrangler, a Golden Retriever puppy. The fact that a puppy brings in more viewers than two cops who were shot dead in New York while sitting in their patrol car in late December did, says something about our great nation.

People would rather joke around with their friends than talk about things that are “depressing.”

People can only name the few men shot by police who were featured on TV and no one else. It’s not a white and black discussion either.  Ask them to name the Native American man killed a day after a Native Lives Matter march. They can’t.

People’s opinions are subjective, if one cop’s bad, they’re all bad, if one man dies, everybody’s in danger. This is one trend that people would be happy to see end.

People would rather watch something like Nancy Grace, who argues over the most controversial stories of today in order to get higher ratings, than Al Jazeera, an Arabic-based world news network that covers everything from Iraqi bombings to South African hit men.

The Ukraine is still a country in a massive amount of turmoil, but that hasn’t been on the news in a long while.

Remember when Nelson Mandela’s death was quickly pushed to the side when Fast and Furious star Paul Walker died? They’re both tragic incidences, but Paul Walker didn’t single handedly unite a nation.

This story isn’t trying to make you switch news sources, it’s not supposed to make you feel guilty: nobody can keep up with everything going on in the world. It’s supposed to make you realize that you can do  something to  make  sure  things  aren’t   so easily forgotten.

It may not be easy to think about all the bad things, and there are plenty of good ones happening all around us. But we can’t forget about the ones that really matter, and we can’t just jump around from issue to issue doing more damage than good.

So try to do some good, volunteer, donate, protest; even talking about the issues instead of changing the subject will make a difference. Spread the word and let people know that the issue is still an issue not another skeleton in the closet.