I’m Outraged That You Give A Damn

August 29, 2013 by pollychromatic 1 Comment

So this recently happened.  I could have linked more things. I linked four, separate horrible things, but it would have been just as easy to link four hundred. Four thousand. Those are just the first four that spring up when I open the news. The first four things that are actually news, that is.

A friend recently asked how [things like this are happening in today’s world]? My only answer is exhaustion. Information exhaustion. Outrage fatigue.

How in the world would a song like Blurred Lines become one of the two big pop hits of the Summer in the US after a year that included the Steubenville trial? That included story after story of girls committing suicide after being raped and then shamed over “their responsibility” of the crime?

How could we, again, be on the edge of a war in the Middle East, possibly, after over a decade of this?

How Russia is raiding people’s homes over suspicion of them being gay, and we’re still, as a world, seemingly going forward with the Winter Olympics there?

Some of my other friends were completely ignited over the fact that Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs was actually a topic of conversation all over their Facebook, but damn. Seriously, damn. With all that up there? A little light outrage is actually sort of a relief.

I get that from a lot of the people around me. I stay fairly plugged into the news, and a lot of people very close to me don’t. It’s not because they don’t care. They care. They just care too much, and it honestly takes too much out of them. It makes it impossible for them to do the things that need doing like going to work, taking care of their children, or doing much besides raving at the top of their lungs or crying in a corner.

I used to get really upset at that reaction. When people want to look away from the dead body, so to speak. Then I realized that the very mechanism that allows me to look is what makes them not want to look.

I don’t feel like there’s much all I can do about these things. I’m pretty powerless to stop it. Awareness is about all I have going. I feel detached from power to change it, so I feel detached from anxiety over it. Those around me who get overwhelmed by these things so completely? That very feeling of powerlessness is what makes them hurt.

Despite the fact that the authors of this article mistake correlation for causation, I can’t say that they’re not onto something here. This is how most people seem to operate. Powerlessness tends to make most people feel anxious, depressed, or other negative emotions. I’m sort of the oddball out on this one. Facebook is a platform for news, rants, and the daily snippets of life. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s not necessarily making people happy.

It’s easy to get attached to, and interested in, fluffy news. That’s what it’s there for. It’s a distraction. There’s a lot to be distracted from, too. Bills, depression, chronic pain, debt, anxiety, employment, sickness: they mount up, along with all of that evening news stuff that is so ever present in our 24 hours news cycle that has now broken through to even being part of our social interactions. Is it any wonder that people turn to something else instead? Hobbies and crafts, religion and philosophy, entertainment.

That’s really okay, and not a thing to get upset about.

This is pretty fluffy, too. It’s just talking a little bit about the fact that when people are being social and chatting about stuff, there’s no reason to judge them on some social scale of how important what they’re talking about is. I’ve seen some version of this sort of outrage about what people use “their corner of the Internet” for going all the way back to the alt.net days. I’m sure it goes further, but that’s when I was getting my legs under me a coming of age adult, so that’s when I first noticed it.

The answer has pretty much always been the same, too. You don’t like it? Scroll on by. Try not to let the outrage overwhelm you that someone else isn’t doing it right, wherein, you’re the one decided what right is.

After all, there are so very many things to be outraged by.

 

Edit: God (on Facebook) gets it right. But that doesn’t really change that it’s actually really sort of okay to not want to feel powerless all the time.