Whatsup with all the guilt?

Many of us will encounter somebody else today and have a conversation with them. Actually that’s not true; all of us will actually meet someone and have a conversation with them whether it is how their life going, to homework issues, to how they can’t wait it till the weekend. During the time you talk to you talk to that person generally you have some input that pertains to the topic. But what happens when the other person starts talking about current events. Will we be able to put our own input into the conversation? Or will we be left in the dark completely confused on what to say.
I think this is one of the reasons why many of us feel guilty when we don’t stay on top of the news. We understand that if we don’t keep up with it that eventually it will catch up with us and bite us in the butt. None of us want to look stupid in front of our friends so we try to current events but when we don’t we know we should have used the three hour break to at least read ten minutes worth of material. Even I get this guilt a lot of the times. I especially get this guilt when we start to get ready to vote. I know I am really illiterate when it comes to politics so obviously when everyone is talking about who their going to vote for and why they are I have no room to argue left or right whether they should or not.
To me it seems like the best way to become civically engaged is to use some passive and active methods to stay on top of the news. Being passively can simply mean changing your homepage to the NewYorkTimes or making it so that whenever you turn on your TV you are automatically on a news station. By doing this you are pretty much throwing news at your own face whenever you do something. Now whenever you turn on your TV you will be directed to a news station where hopefully they have something interesting going on which will distract you from what you originally were doing. Being actively engaging can be a little bit harder on the other hand (is it just me or does this sentence seem rhetorical). To be active engaged we must simply force ourselves to make time to get online and start reading news articles. For me I find this easiest when I am with my friends and none of them are talking or when they are talking about something that I have no interest in. During this time I usually pull out my phone and get online to the NewYorkTimes and start reading different articles. Though everyone might not be able to do this, others can simply get online when they don’t want to do their homework (this way you still are productive when you take a break).
No matter what I think it’s very important for all of us to feel guilty when we aren’t on top of current events or the news. With the guilty feeling it shows that we want to be able to converse with our friends and not look foolish.