A few weeks ago, several people I knew seemed baffled by a prisoner exchange the U.S. was involved in. I could almost swear it was the first time they’d heard of a prisoner exchange program.

Over the past few months, I’ve witnessed genuine shock in people around me, and I’ve watched them be shaken up by the news.

Clearly, they had only started following the news recently and weren’t as apathetic as I’d taught myself to be.

The atrocities they read about were alien to them.

“A responsible citizen keeps up with the news,” we were told in our seventh-grade civics class.

I never really understood why keeping up with the news was expected of us.

I was a naïve seventh grader; an ignorant, stupid seventh grader at that, and the least of my concerns was keeping up with the news.

I placed it in my mental box of puzzling social axioms along with other social/legal rules I couldn’t comprehend at the time, such as why it was relevant to study history. Over the years, I’ve come to understand and see the sides of the equation I was blissfully unaware of.

I attended an extremely strict boarding school.

This meant we were shielded from most of the external media sources.

So when we got our hands on the newspapers, we devoured it like they were, whatever it is that children are fond of today — YouTube or something.

The bottom line is that we were in the habit of reading the news from a young age.

I remember how shocking the first few weeks of reading the paper were for me.

The crime and international sections were what hit me the hardest. The atrocities the papers mentioned were unfathomable to me.

 At times, there were so many crimes occurring that several crime reports would be combined into a single story.

 It shook me to think there was so much crime that there wasn’t enough space in the paper for it.

I never really understood the stories about diplomacy on the international section back then. The war stories were unsettling, to say the least. To loosely quote Russell Peters, “every time (I) turned on the news, some new country was (going to war) with a middle-eastern country.”

We, as humans, are storytellers. And every war story I’d heard had come to an end.

It took me a good while to realize that certain conflicts would last longer than they did in the stories I’d heard.

The other night, the news was abuzz with the U.S. government’s stance on the current conflicts in the Middle East.

For many people I know, it seemed like the beginning of a new chapter — a sad one.

As an observer of the news for several years now, it sadly seemed mundane; it was another story about a country going to war with some country in the Middle East.

I try to be as apathetic about it as I can be.

Does it ever end?