I’m not sure when exactly this anticipatory dread began, but as far as my recollections go, our generation hasn’t experienced “normal” in a very long time. Since COVID-19, the past five years have been wave after wave of continuous “unprecedented events.” Our intuitive scale for normalcy is so heavily tilted that it’s practically impossible to evaluate what should be considered an “acceptable amount” of problems occurring in society — especially as alarming levels of crises unfold one after another. We can’t blame civilians who feel powerless when facing frequent natural or man-made calamities.

So, suppose you’re feeling desensitized from witnessing all the ongoing large-scale global catastrophes in the world; you may feel the apathetic desire to invest less commitment and care into the worrisome news. Would contemporary society be magnificently better when direct actions are taken against immediate contingencies such as the pandemic? Not necessarily. 

When our attention is oriented around the visceral tragedies that dominate the public domain, we tend to ignore the dynamic and delayed violence dispersed across time and space. This willing ignorance is particularly problematic because we accept the narrative that certain critical situations are not considered violence at all: They are justified as a one-time occasion, mismanagement or even “unintended consequences.” For example, impoverished populations’ suffering from the depletion of resources is perceived as the most common demonstration of this notion; slow violence has grown to encompass many forms of dispossession. 

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Because the slow violence instances are so integrated into the structure we exist in (for USC students, it would be the school we have to conform to), we are unable to identify them right away. Then, when their impacts finally come to light, we are often shocked by the devastating effects they introduce to an already destabilized society.

 These systematic failures include general concepts such as climate change, police brutality, and urban housing and land ownership. These issues triggered hazardous environmental damages, the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, gentrification and displacement to create the most prevalent wealth disparity of the 21st century. These spectacles of pain are lethal. 

In the short term, it’s difficult to identify how traumatic events brew into our society’s course of development. However, when the media exposure subsides, the palpable challenge of needing to address these emblematic deficiencies in the system still stands. Slow violence plays out through cumulative interactions, and they are not stagnant by any means. They haunt us for generations until we feel so defeated we lose our willpower to practice conscious acts. Moreover,  these incremental injustices intricately hit low-income, minority communities. 

Gradual deterioration as such in environmental degradation and systemic workplace racism physically and psychologically diminish and sometimes even annihilate certain groups from within. Sadly, it’s much harder for us to call for retribution against the “unfairness” of Mother Nature or hidden power dynamics, even though we know the natural disasters themselves are products of our wrongdoings.
We do not have the power to intervene with law enforcement agencies or corporate entities, but our school is our primary medium for interacting with counter-violence agendas. As an institution that inadvertently perpetuates resource inequalities, USC, as a symbol, is not willing to outwardly push students toward defiance despite our well-educated administrators acknowledging the prevalence of unseen harm. 

However, I do want to give the credit to USC: Our school is not completely oblivious to the problems that are presumably “out of sight.” With research and practical initiatives such as the Neighborhood Data for Social Change, USC has made meaningful attempts to make restorations to its backyard and beyond. Whether these strides are successful remains ambiguous, as much of the well-intended efforts to overturn our consumption of the physical landmass and the finite economic assets, come with dubious side effects. After all, even minute changes such as introducing new businesses to an area can contribute to the cost of living, which complicates the already existing troubling phenomena against working-class communities through imperceptible alterations. 

We college students are positioned in a unique space to tackle slow violence and its enduring consequences. We’re not only exposed to vast information sources in the classrooms but also empowered to become innovative changemakers who could potentially overturn the traditional approaches to long-term upheavals. It’s our obligation to become resilient citizens who can generate appropriate reactions toward these imminent events and exercise the latent manifestation of everyday resistance so we can help repair the communities harmed by slow violence.