“We don't care” seems to
cover the hundreds of different “bad things” I could point to
that undermine any hope I have for the future. Professor X believes
we need to believe in and ignite the hope that can forever invigorate
the human spirit. Of course, when that hope leads to the end of most
life on the planet, he gets to go back in time and try something
else.
VICE is always a huge impact on my thoughts. It's just the worst
examples we as a species set in life and how explicitly bad we are at
even admitting to them, let alone pretending to fix them. “Mini”
disasters all over the globe that span across every level of
humanity. In some regard, to even report on these issues, and to feel
an empathetic sickness in watching it, we're stuck “caring.” But,
what it seems to do for me more is justify a very George Carlin-esc
fuck it all it doesn't matter kind of sense.
We pretend radiation isn't a thing. We pretend we have more than
one planet. We pretend that cultures are equal morally. We pretend to
care about sacrifice or health. We pretend to care about war. We
pretend to care about kids getting educated or honesty in reporting.
We pretend to be outraged by scandals and racism.
Of course, when I say “we,” I mean progressive moral elites,
and from my small window of the U.S. Bill Maher recently stated that
you can't really be upset that someone didn't evolve on the same
moral time line in the way you have. If they want to be racist or
homophobic, that's just their opinion you have to choke down if you
believe in free speech. We slut-shame people like that by every once
in a while fining them or giving them a bad name in the press. We
write about their toxic influence on modernity in books they'll never
read. We mock them on shows they don't watch. We pretend that it's a
worthwhile opinion nonetheless because we refuse the factual fuck-ups
they're allowed to make in service to that opinion.
And it's because we don't care. We have our own lives. We need to
take care of our kids. We need to stimulate our expansive and
impressive knowledge banks. I'm not on the shores of where the next
super storm hits because of course, I already knew that when you fuck
with the planet it fucks back. They kind of got what they deserved.
The VA can't get through records? Haven't you heard how abysmally
wrong war is? What do I care if you blew your legs off and now
struggle to get help for PTSD? What are you, an idiot? Shit blows up
over there! Or did you hear the ocean is running out of fish? Ahh, I
never liked sushi anyway and I have big plans for my porch garden.
I can't imagine what other kind of internal dialogue these people
could be having. If it was “I need to learn more about this to
enact change” you might see all of their hard work and reporting
translating into something changing. You can literally find any kind
of “just as correct” article arguing on behalf of compelling and
creating leaders as you can find “everyone do something small.”
No one knows. They can't know, so they can't care. And what they can
know, only serves to justify how much more “reasonable” they'd be
in not caring.
I was recently told to “let it go” when relating my experience
with wasting time and money in school to a friend who'd asked. This
came from a drunk older woman kind of under her breath as we were at
a wedding table. This sentiment always seems to be the champion idea
of people I find most hopeless. If I was broken down crying and
pounding the table because of what transpired during school, I could
see for a second what she might be speaking to. But even recalling
and explaining something that happened, to someone that asked, was
regarded as the opportune moment to be old-titty-slapped-with-wisdom
about what I should no longer consider a problem.
But her's seems like the popular sentiment. It doesn't really
matter what it is, eventually people find it “wise” to say and
behave like it doesn't matter. Now, I'm all for existential crisis
discussions, but I'm not for this kind of hopeless and dismissive
sort of “fuck you” to a legitimate concern that, regardless of
your opinion of it, had and continues to have consequences. She has a
kid ushering the wedding after all, who I'm sure she wants to waste
money on and hear about how his degree and time meant nothing.
Surely we learn to alleviate systemic problems and develop better
ways to talk about things we choose to be collective amnesiacs
about...right? What were we even talking about? Meh, it doesn't
matter.
We're saved and condemned by how stupid we are. We can write off
genuine potentially life-ending problems as mere accounting errors.
Then, we're dumb enough to convince ourselves that things will be
okay. Then, we develop entire philosophies and institutions to
sometimes even physically condition us to never think differently!
We'll sing and dance as we circle the drain, and no one will be the
wiser, if we have anything to say about it.
You can justify putting out a shitty product because of “market
forces and profit.” You can justify killing people, for any reason,
because of “sand niggers,” or wait, I think we still keep it
polite and roll to “Islamist extremists” and threats to
“freedom.” You can justify throwing endless amounts of money at
something you want to change if only to come to the lucid realization that
“it's all about PR after all!” For good measure, why not justify
a habit of denial and contradiction because “those beliefs bring
them comfort!”
Did you know I read a book once on the difference between Sunni
and Shia? Don't ask me to define it this precise moment, but dammit,
I was so much smarter than the simple war mongers in the White House.
At least for a day or two. Oh the attitude that the intellectuals or
technology can save us anymore than the screaming lunatics. What
undermines them all is a bad theory of human possibilities. Well, bad
in that it probably doesn't genuinely assume most of us will have to
die off before we see any “major leaps forward.”
“There are only 2 things you can do wrong on the path to truth,
not starting, and not following it until the end.”
The truth, as far as it seems to me right now, is that little
points of triumph and pride don't outweigh the amount of horrible
things happening every second of every day. “We the people”
aren't that. We're a bunch of animals running wild. Often, it seems,
we have to be extremely lucky to even get people in our own goddamn
families that care about us in any real, let alone constructive, way.
We don't do things until we're forced. Until we feel threatened right
to our faces. We talk about the brink, we calculate the destruction,
we'll always plunge right over the cliff.
I need to find a way to brace for impact, or, you know, “just
let it go.”
