“Tonight's 'Talking Points' memo:
Was Hitler onto something about mandatory IDs for non-Christians, and
how can Donald Trump learn from it?”
*click*
“How not caring enough about
EVERY tragedy makes you no better than the terrorists themselves,
more at 11.”
*click*
“Another shooting has occurred in
Colorado and Texas, see why liberals are stopping our lone hero with
a gun from showing up and putting a stop to these violent crimes and
how the irony is completely lost on us because our gun laws already
don't exist he--”
*click*
“I thoroughly believe that every
white cis person in this country is a part of the problem, whether
they're aware of it or not. It's not my job to educate them on their
ignorance, only to condemn them for their stupid--”
*click*
“See how entitled millennials are
while we sabotage their future because of how badly we've fucked up.
Yes you can say 'fuck' on television no--”
*click*
No
more of that for me, my heart can't take it. Is it okay? Do I have
to feel ashamed for not caring about everything as much as other
people? Because it sure as Hell feels like I should. Lately
whenever I talk to people, the only thing that comes to mind is how
much I'm not caring about whatever happened in some distant country I
will never go to, about some child getting shot to death again for
the fortieth time, or the ever-collapsing black hole of rational
thought also frequently referred to as the American political system. And I don't mean a singular child dying repeatedly. Does that happen? There would either have to be some incredible science or fucked-up witchcraft to be making that shit happen.
I mean, it's not like I don't want to care. But it's just so
gosh-darn difficult to. Let's examine one small instance where this
came into play. FACEBOOK. People
remember the attacks that occurred in Paris. I mean to this day, I
still really don't care to think about the details, but it happened.
People died, and it was sad, yes. But a few things that I noticed.
...a few select groups of people were getting upset because others
were either using a flag filter for their profile picture in
remembrance, or because it was apparently stealing Lebanon's tragedy
thunder when something or another blew again in there for the
umpteenth time. This entire experience was enlightening to me, the
impassive viewer. You know what it taught me?
Fuck
people who care too damn much, and fuck their FEELINGS.
Empathy
is something that is seriously overburdened in this day and age where
everybody should care about everything and we should all be strong
and open-minded individuals and should strive for social equality and
the such, blahblahblah. If you don't care, you're contributing to
the problem. Because we cared about the attacks in Paris, it
contributed to the problem of the westernization of social media
since we're not paying attention to other regions in the world that
simultaneously were awash with grief at the same time. Like Lebanon.
Or for the people mocking the others who were too busy chasing
Lebanon's ambulance to notice, Kenya where somebody shot up a
university and killed 148 people, because we ALL remember that on the
news. Oh, I can get more, it's not difficult. In this day and age
of over-exposure to every shitty event occurring all around the
world? You bet your fucking ass that we can go further down the
rabbit hole.
Instead
though, let's take a healthy dose of “not give a fuck” and take
this: just because you can care about something, doesn't mean you
should. Empathy is a finite resource. It's the reason a secondary
stress disorder like compassion fatigue exists. People get burnt out
on their feelings, when they're forced to care too much too often. A
lawyer has to deal with a man who just lost his daughter in a car
accident; to the man, that's like trying to navigate an issue during
the worst day of your fucking life. To the lawyer, it's Tuesday.
And to the news, it's every day.
In
this day of the internet, everything is faster. Gathering of
information, networking, everything is sleeker, better, immediate.
Unless you use Century Link, in which case it randomly drops and
slows down. But we have a generation, the millennials, raised on
this information superhighway. But the issue with that is that for
people seeking a cause to rally behind, they quickly learn how much
of a problem it is. Media outlets make it that much faster and
easier to get information to you, and to a generation diagnosed with
ADD, overexposure occurs. And if there's anything to take from what
I'm going to say that is absolutely true, this will be it:
Overexposure
to the media only breeds two things. It's either apathy, or
contempt.
If
you are bombarded with information relentlessly long enough, you're
going to go numb to cope, or it's going to breed that cynical,
malicious fire and it's going to consume you. Why the Hell else would
people get upset over a fucking flag backdrop on Facebook when people
are just trying to memorialize an event? It becomes a switch people
can't turn off, where they look for the cause, the fight in
everything that they can look for a fight in, where they look for the
negative connotations. What paranoid, fucked-up, hateful world have
you created in your head-canon where complacency or ignorance is
misconstrued as malicious intent?
Simply
put: why am I condemned for not caring enough? What is enough? Not
everybody has time for that shit. I gots shit to do. Like sifting
through pornography or posting Star Wars spoilers on the Splatoon
Miiverse.
It
can take something really fucked to make somebody realize the mistake
they've made when caring too much about something. It's easy to put
your empathy in a statistic or a news article; it's fucking easy to
empathize with Lebanon when it's not at any of your actual empathetic
expense. Once it gets personal though, that shit ain't so easy now
is it? How many times have you seen somebody bring up a tragedy in
their life, or post about it online, and you just offer your courtesy
care? “Don't worry, if you need anything, I'm here to talk” you
say. Then that person's now in your life, talking about all the
terrible shit that's happened, and whenever something goes wrong
again, you have to put up with that person again. Like when you find
out that they lost their job. Or their girlfriend broke up with
them. Or a family member died. Or they got mayo on their sandwich
when they said 'no mayo', oh the humanity of it all! Then you go
“Shit, this empathy crap is harder than I thought. I didn't
actually care, I was just trying to be nice.” Oh, but you would
NEVER say that, right?
Listen,
it's okay not to care about people. It's okay not to care about
things. It doesn't make you a bad person. People only have so much
real estate for empathy. Not everybody has it in them to care about
every single fucking terrible event that happens in the world. That
person you're just sort of friends with, you don't have to let them
into your life and place serious personal value in them if they're
not important enough. You aren't a villain for it. Your empathy
deserves to be taken care of and respected by other people for what
it's used for. Apathy isn't necessarily evil, sometimes it's being
your shield keeping out all that awful shit from making you want to
kill yourself.
Care
about what you can to the extent you can, it's not someone else's
place to tell you what it should be and how much.
Unless
it's something really fucking stupid like being an MRA. Fuck those
guys.
