Wading through a media landscape rigged to convince us caring about others is for chumps, that empathy is just an obstacle to buying more rape yachts, that each person who doesn’t agree with you is a zombie to be shot in a video game, I need to do something? I have to do something with my hours, other than weep impotently. I want to convince them we are all humans with the same experiences, but they just wouldn’t understand. Their golden idols mean more to them than their own kids. Than life itself. Can’t just pick them up and shake their brains back in. Violence tends to lead to more violence, not less? All a lecture does is reinforce their desires to fight back more.
Self-hardening battlements of hatred. Compressing the more we bash at them.
The best I’ve come up with? Is to try and appeal to their vanity. To try and make it a challenge. Like the idiots who pretended to raise money for charity by pouring ice over their heads, to get folks to watch their YouTubes? That did actually make a little cash as well. Play to the massive egos. Maybe turn them into forces for good, despite themselves? There’s one weird trick to it.
We need to make it clear how dog-shit easy it is to take. If you want things and you do not care who you hurt, it’s there for the pillage. This is America, the land of the thieves and the home of the grave. Stolen from one continent’s worth of peoples and built by slaves stolen from another.
But being good, man, that’s the hard mode on the video game. Being good to each other takes a lot of goddamn effort in a nation run by the rapist children of business swindlers, our American Dream is a two-stall garage and a white picket fence built over a river of blood. Just make up a computer program to steal for you. Just sell fake vitamins with pictures of Christ on the bottles. Just invest in a shoe factory on the other side of the sea. Profiting from evil is Easy-Mode here.
Fred Rogers had the charisma of a walking god, he could’ve had anything he wanted, he could have been a senator or a billionaire used car dealer. But he chose hard mode using puppets and piano jazz to let people know they were special. Jimmy Carter had the genius to pilot a nuclear submarine and the bravery to dismantle an atomic meltdown, imagine how simple a real-estate scam would have been for him. Audrey Hepburn had the charm to stop a train in its tracks, but she used it to fight Nazis in the Dutch Resistance before getting into the business of the shows.
So, I ask the monsters, how lazy are you? How much of a goddamn coward? If you’re truly so goddamned great, take up a real challenge and do some good in this world instead. I dare you.
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