"Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care"
by John Wilder
"It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything. Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:
• Ukraine versus Russia.
• Palestine versus Israel.
• Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
• Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.
And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant. I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.
I’ll take a controversial opinion: I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me. And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.
Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it. News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion. Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information. I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details. I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy: what are the facts of the situation?
Another corollary: if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away? Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place? Not really. And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.
But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them. I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.
We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe. People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game. But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares. In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants. That has ceased. Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral. I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.
I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity. Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.
Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders. Just not our borders. Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction? Not a problem. But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?
Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up. I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians. And no one can make me care.
Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go. If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another. By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.
The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about. The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century. Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin. Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao. It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.
One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic. I guess I can see that. Ma Wilder cared what I thought. Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet. What’s next?
From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him. Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador. Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint. Now, not so much. Why? The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right. When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.
Me, I care about our borders first. And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®."
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