Most people are just people

A hard thing to wrap your head around is that most people aren’t particularly bad or good. I mean I think most people would like to be good but it really depends on how they’re feeling that day or what else they’ve got going on. Like, I try to give cash to beggars in the street but I’m not usually going to go out of my way if I don’t have cash that day or I’m in a hurry or they rub me the wrong way. I’d like to think this doesn’t make me a bad person but then again I guess if I were genuinely compassionate I probably wouldn’t ignore anyone in need. Of course there are so many people in need that if I dedicated myself to them the way I think a good person would I would probably end up destitute or dead. But that’s a pretty easy way to rationalize ignoring the pain of others.

By the same token I want to believe that the majority of people who seem to have bought into the performance of cruelty that defines the current era don’t actually think causing mass-scale human suffering is a good thing. I’d like to think that most of them are kind of along for the ride and if they saw the actual consequences of their actions or got to know a guy who got disappeared to El Salvador they would feel differently. Then again the actual fucking White House is doing Ghibli AI tweets of a sobbing mother being taken away in chains so what do I know. Maybe they all love this shit.

I guess my point is that we’re all complicit in the pain of others. Most of the comfort I take as a given is because of somebody, somewhere, who is suffering. To be fair my own suffering has spent plenty of time propping up the comfort of the fabulously wealthy so why shouldn’t I pay it forward.

Generally I think a lot of people like me think someone should do something about all this. Not me, of course, I’m very busy, but someone definitely should. So we all keep on going about our business since our suffering isn’t so bad that we want to take matters into our own hands and anyway we’ve got our own problems. We’re not the ones doing the cruelty and if we had the power we’d do things differently so why should we feel bad about it.

Is that evil? Is it our job to stand up to injustice even if it’s not our fault? I don’t know man I just work here. I’m just trying to stay above water myself. I’m too tired for this shit.