I honestly don’t care. I saw this thing on the internet about Haiti. It was a graph and basically it showed that before the earthquake Americans didn’t care about Haiti, after the earthquake they cared about it, and now they don’t care anymore. Wow, that’s so terrible. People are so hypocritical and shallow.
Also people were saying that the oil spill wasn’t getting enough coverage and people didn’t care enough. Now people care.
But there’s flooding in Tennessee. And people don’t care enough about that. We should care more and keep caring.
But you know what? I don’t care now, I didn’t before, and I never will. I honestly don’t care one bit about Haiti.
I’m not exactly some callous asshole who hates people, himself, the world. And though I’ve been accused of it, I’m not a bitter, self-loathing, misanthropic curmudgeon. But I’m honest.
And it’s not that I don’t care about people. I do. I donate monthly to certain organizations and sporadically to others. I do volunteer work inconsistently in my city. I do contribute.
And I have a deep sense of anxiety, worry, sadness, angst, and shame about the world in general and our species’ historic and unapologetic cruelty and suffering.
But there’s a limit to how much I can care about world events and millions of people I don’t know. And to be perfectly honest, my sensitivity to the specific wrongs of world was eroded 20 years ago.
To reiterate: I don’t care about millions of people dying, suffering, or crying out is agony. Because it isn’t anything new, it doesn’t change my perspective on our world, and it doesn’t affect me.
I do have very emotional and heartfelt responses to things that happen in my own life. But the suffering of millions of faceless people I will never see does not move me and I won’t pretend it does.
