No One Cares
or do they? the answer might just surprise you!
On Monday, I went to the coffee shop and the skatepark. At the skatepark, I saw a man with fishnet tights on his legs under his shorts. I saw another young man with painted nails and what appeared to be a training bra underneath his tank top. Getting coffee, I saw a college-aged overweight woman wearing a t-shirt that said BRAT in white lettering.
On the way home, I saw a middle-aged man texting on his phone as he drove his BMW coupe through intersection after intersection. His license plate read GR8FUL.
‘For what?’ I wondered, for the apathy and boredom that allows you to catapult yourself blindly forward in a $60,000 vehicle?
Sometimes, I feel like we’re Jerry and the gang in the last episode of Seinfeld where they watch a man getting robbed at gunpoint. From across the street, they make fun of the victim’s weight as Kramer videotapes the crime. Larry David has proved his prescience over and over again, but not least in the writing of that scene.
Does anyone care about anything at all? I think that’s a fair question at this point in the history of the world. The woman next to me right now is wearing a denim jacket with the words “What A Friend We Have In Jesus” on the back. She’s paired her outfit with a pair of Levi’s and bleach-white Nike SB Dunks. One wonders what her buddy would think of the enslavement of the Uyghurs in China.
But who am I to talk? I’m writing this on a computer that the manufacturing company places nets around the building to stop their employees from taking an unscheduled, permanent break for air.
Maybe that’s the point. Can you care about anything without caring about everything? Or should we at least strive for consistency in the things that we may or may not care about?
When Rand Paul was accused of plagiarism in 2013, the New York Times ran this headline: Senator Rand Paul Faces New Charges of Plagiarism. Okay, got it. When Kamala Harris faced allegations of the very same thing this week, this was their preeminent response: Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.
There was faux outrage when Trump talked about ‘black jobs’ in the first debate with President Biden — who had no pushback on the phrase because he wasn’t conscious for that particular hour and a half. But when Harris announced her plan for ‘Black Men’ — whatever that is — that would help them get set up with their very own weed stores, no one thought that might be a little racist?
When I’m elected, I’m getting every poor white man in rural Tennessee their very own meth roadside stand.
Republicans were furious when Biden wouldn’t debate RFK Jr or Marianne Williamson (lol), but I haven’t heard a peep of protest to the fact that current US Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) refuses to debate her opponent, Gloria Johnson, ahead of her reelection bid this November.
The FBI visited
to ask him a few questions regarding his decision to publish the leaked JD Vance dossier from the Trump campaign, yet I saw no claims of ‘weaponization of the government’ from the GOP. To be fair, it hasn’t caused much of a stir on the Left either — they’re starting to like that sort of thing no matter who it targets.What even constitutes caring?
How much should a person reasonably have to care about? What if, instead, we focused on issues that are beyond politics? Maybe we’ll get better answers there.
Remember the feminist ‘not my President’ presidents of 2016 and their funny little hats? It’s noteworthy that when that group thought their access to abortion might be a little less ‘on demand’ than they would prefer, they took to the streets in large numbers.
When millions of women got sent back to the Stone Age by the Taliban (and an assist from the Biden Administration), not one pink hat was to be found on the steps of the Capitol. UN Women didn’t condemn October 7th, and no American feminist organization asked the Biden Administration to quit taking it easy on Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini for not wearing her hijab correctly.
Kamala Harris urged the IDF not to invade Rafah, citing the fact that she had ‘studied the maps.’ For all of those wondering, yes, an amateur interest in cartography does qualify you to make assertions regarding complex military strategy. When an American hostage was found executed in, you guessed it, there was no admission, no apology.
When, on Thursday, Yahya Sinwar, the man responsible for orchestrating the horrors of October 7th and the abduction of seven American citizens, was killed by the IDF in, you guessed it — man, you guys are getting good —Harris pretended as if it was the result she’d been anticipating all along.
She gave some tepid warning to terrorists that America always gets her man or something dumb like that. Needless to say, she made no effort to clarify that it was, in fact, her administration who were actively working against the astounding moral and military victory achieved by the Israelis and that US military personnel played the smallest of parts in the operation. Does anyone think she cares?
The COVID pandemic has been over for two years, and to my knowledge, not one government official has been held responsible for their response. No mea culpa has been issued for mandatory lockdowns, excess deaths, or the thousands of small businesses that were forced to shut down to make way for those plucky upstarts, Amazon, Target, and Walmart.
The former president has still never acknowledged the insane conflict of interests presented by Operation Warp Speed and the Emergency Use Authorizations that the US government handed over to Big Pharma. Maybe our apology for that one is coming in 75 years, you know, the same amount of time the FDA said it would take to give the public all of their data on the Pfizer covid vaccine. The anticipation only makes it that much better.
Of course, all of those things are in the distant past. What about now?
It was only very recently that we learned that the entire Democratic Party and its media apparatus believe that President Biden isn’t fit to run for a second term — isn’t fit to campaign for a second term.
Yet, somehow, the group diagnosis of his apparent mental incompetence doesn’t extend the remaining few months of his presidency. Yes, well, you see, it’s not the job of president he’s unfit for, it’s the job of asking to be president that he can’t do. The job of president is much less demanding than asking for all that money and all those votes.
No one cares. Apparently, the IRS will still ask for your money, the Federal Reserve will still print more, and the FBI will still show up at your private residence, all without a cogent leader in the Oval Office. It’s mostly an honorary title, I guess.
On the Right side of things, Donald Trump has fully welcomed RJK Jr into his ranks, spawning the sub-movement MAHA (Make American Healthy Again).
Now, those of us who’ve been concerned about the mass poisoning of Americans via the FDA’s approved methods of delivery are supposed to take seriously that the man who fed McDonald’s cheeseburgers to the Clemson football team when they visited the White House understands how government and corporations have made the American population sicker than ever.
I’m not saying he doesn’t or can’t, but the incongruence is staggering.
Watching the Democrats be quasi ‘anti-war’ in the early 2000s and then all ‘let’s nuke Putin’ while the Republicans have become relative peaceniks makes me think almost no concern is genuine.
Is mine? All I’m doing is writing about it, which is only one step more than not thinking about it at all. You can save your plaudits for someone else.
Maybe Melania Trump was speaking for the entire American conscience when she wore the jacket that read ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?’
This 1968 Paul McCartney interview comes to mind. McCartney is asked if, as an artist, he has a responsibility to social causes, i.e. the disabled in England, starvation in India, etc.
The Beatle says no, but the journalist presses on, “But doesn’t it worry you?”
“No,” says Paul, “starvation in India doesn’t worry me one bit. Not one iota. It doesn’t, man. And it doesn’t worry you, if you’re honest. You just pose. You don’t even know it exists.”
When you watch the world around you, it doesn’t look like people are acting as if the next election is an existential one. It doesn’t look like anyone’s concerned about nuclear war. It just doesn’t look like our abysmal reproduction rate is driving us toward societal collapse in the next one hundred years.
Of course, that doesn’t mean none of those things aren’t true. And it doesn’t mean that some of us don’t have genuine concerns. Maybe some of us do care, or maybe we just pose.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA