but don’t really care about, inside… I’d say the environment is one. I think most just say it to sound nice, but I think if the alternative was no phone, or twice the cost of living, etc… I think most don’t care what happens after death.
War and poverty seems to be another. I’ve seen so much online sadness, the typical tacky gofuckme pages begging for money, while they make an average of $80,000/yr perhaps… What about those who make minimum wage and who’ll do so forever because there are hardly any great jobs in the US (and maybe elsewhere)… Seems like the entire world is going through austerity and the personal message is “to get mine”… About war, it seems like each political party flips when their “leaders” say something…
Back to poverty, I’ve never seen so much hate for the few pennies people get for food stamps, but yet, millions don’t care about the TRILLIONS spent on war, based on lies, which only makes the world more dangerous, and even those who live won’t be the same, having an effect on many others.
I see this going to the pit very fast ……. but yeah the food stamp thing irks me just because certain people bitch about it while eating food I paid for using my ebt card ………
Then don’t let them eat that food. Seriously, bitching about SNAP while eating food bought with an EBT card is just… Don’t let whoever that is eat your snap food.
This isn’t the pit, so I’ll watch my language. But my paraphrasing of the OP is “I don’t give a damn about anybody but myself; therefore I assume nobody else does either.” It’s a sad, bitter point of view.
“The environment” is a pretty broad brush. It could mean not having people throwing garbage on the side of the road, it could mean my water doesn’t have lead like Flint MI, it could mean my food prices are reasonable because the ocean ecosystem isn’t collapsing. Those matters affect me while I’m alive, so I care about them.
As far as what happens after I die… I have children, so automatically I care about their world. I think a decent person would also care about the world of children who don’t belong to them.
If you’re talking about global warming and the imminent collapse of ecosystems and food chains and loss of species and human-habitable environment… should I care? That will happen after I die, so I really shouldn’t care. But logically I know that humanity will never be able to access another habitable Earth with the richness of life we have right now. It’s literally a priceless thing; you cannot put a price on something that doesn’t exist in the reachable universe. Illogically, something in my personality cares very much about priceless things existing after I die.
Personally I am unable to imagine a world without me in it. It’s not narcissism, it’s the intellectual limitation that the world as I understand it is a result of me existing as a thinking being, so I am literally not capable of imagining anything outside that. Since I can’t imagine the possibility of being dead, I guess that means my brain thinks I’m going to live forever, and so I think things that happen in 300 years might actually happen to me. So that’s a broken-brain explanation of why someone might care about this.
Apart from all that, you should care about the environment. The earth is a special thing. If we fuck it up while you’re alive, you end up eating garbage and pollution. If we fuck it up after we’re dead, you’ve destroyed a precious thing for billions of people who haven’t been born yet. That seems important.
There’s a few I’ve heard ranting on about “the deficit”. “The deficit” this, “the deficit” that.
Now, I know these people. Well. For 20+ years. If not deliberately anti-intellectual, they’re not very well read at all either. Were decent sorts, apolitical as much out of apathy as lack of civics knowledge. As they neared 60, they swung kinda’ right. Kinda’ hard right actually. Discussions with them reveal they’re no more well read than they ever were, but railing about “the deficit” seems to be their go-to issue that sounds “smart” to them and the reason they support one political side over the other…without them admitting the real reason they vote the way they do is guns and/or religion.
The dead giveaway is the canned language used in synchronicity.
Exactly this. The people about rant over ‘that danggone gub’mint deficit’ do not track the size of the deficit, do not understand the difference between a budget and trade deficit, do not care when their party make choices that inflate it, don’t pay enough taxes that it really affects them. For them, the deficit is an argument for austerity, and austerity is an argument toward fucking over people they don’t really care about.
For reference, see how eagerly Paul Ryan (so-called “deficit wonk”) jizzed his pants over running up gargantuan deficits when it meant tax cuts for the rich. That’s who the deficit people are.
Again, this isn’t necessarily what I believe… We’ve already destroyed the environment - even the infrastructure is broken (water in Flint), bridges collapsing in Minnesota, etc…, but I never ever read or hear about it. I think trivia and gossip gets in the way of the real priorities, and although everyone says they want clean air and clean water, it’s clear that we don’t act in this way. As individuals or groups.
I’m not talking about poor people who’ll take jobs (despite the hazards of a power plant) for deregulation for example… I think their immediate poverty needs are justifiable. It’s easier for someone in the middle-class talk say, “I’m buying a car with great gas mileage” when those options aren’t available for the poor (50 million Americans).
Or really, people they hate. Not they’ve ever met them or interacted with them in a manner that would make them hate them: their preferred TV pundits told them they “hate” them.
Your main point also brutally true, and related to what I alluded: They know fuck-all about budgets, deficits, how/why they occur, much less their transient nature. “The deficit” sounds better than “I’m a single issue gun nut voter with a mean streak a mile wide”.
around here its the illegal immigrants wanting to swarm the border and the lord god trump is gonna save all that’s right and holy since he saved us from Obama’s muslim takeover of America ……….
I know people who publicly “support” immigrants, but then will say to me in private, “But I rather not taking chances” and then usually a mention of, “Well, they vote Democrat 80% of the time”
“Did you see these prayer rugs that are taking over the US?” – fear sells… And who better to know than the man mentored by Roy Cohn, the Joe McCarthy liar/lawyer
MortSahlFan, with the exception of research scholars and those with firsthand knowledge, people are informed by the media available to them. People bitch about deficit, welfare, immigration, etc. because The News tells them 1) those things are bitchworthy, B) in which direction to take their bitchcraft. You’re sticking your face in that trap by assuming the incongruities of The Issues with your own morality are unique to you. They are not. I think it makes no sense to say anything more damning than “Most people don’t like to think for themselves.”
People are generally mentally lazy and will believe what is told to them by someone pretending to be in authority. That’s how you get things like clergies, armies, and governments. For instance, the reason President Trump is such a controversy is not because he is a beneficiary of The Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, it’s not (particularly) because he is using The White House for free publicity of his private organization and family members, or that he’s a career grifter. It is because he understood the power of advertising to sway larger opinions, and he entered (allegedly) into an agreement with a traditional adversary to falsely advertise his popularity and invent an image that would resonate as “Well, a lot of people like him and think he legit, I’ll give him a go, why not?” Yes, everyone got to make up their own mind about him, but they did it with absolutely fabricated information. False advertising. I just pick on Trump because he’s easy, but lies and distortions are everywhere around us, preached loudly as truths by people with an interest in selling something. Those who buy aren’t necessarily selfish (as your OP suggests), but thoroughly disinformed and/or confused by competing ‘truths’.
I think there are a lot of nuances to the word “care”. I am concerned about many issues. There is no single issue I want to spend all my time talking about. Many issues are profoundly complex and some parts of an issue like war or poverty concern me more than others. I don’t falsely pretend to care about something which I don’t. However, I also have moderate opinions on many subjects that won’t impress zealots on either side of the issue.
For example, indigenous rights in Canada are important. They have historically been under addressed. They deserve some remedy. But I don’t want an in depth discussion of one topic every time I listen to public radio. And remedies I consider reasonable and balanced would be seen by some others as too much or too little. I think there is both more compassion and more compassion fatigue now than at many other times.
I won’t dispute the power of the media of course… Or the power of the internet, and those who just agree with those they like. “Well if Bernie Sanders said it, it must be true”.
I avoid the Trump stuff, because it IS too easy, and usually bipolar. Anytime someone disagrees with someone they are a “Russian Bot” or a “Spy” all of a sudden, which again feeds into a paranoid narrative, which keeps people watching those commercials and buying stuff they don’t need and can’t afford.
I cured my “I can’t imagine being dead”-ness by simply remembering what it was like for me before I was born. Same feeling there.
Actually, I’m evil enough not only to not care about the environment after I’m gone, but to be meanly glad all might end fifty years after I die, according to some experts. It means I saw the whole story and didn’t miss much.