“Do you KNOW there’s other people?”

The paraphrase is Eddie Izzard, of course, during the award-winning Dressed to Kill, when he asks his American audience “do you know there’re other countries?” And the crowd roars, because after all, Americans are famous for not really grasping the existence of anything beyond our borders.  It’s an age-old story, one going back to Washington and his warning against foreign entanglements.  Fair enough.

But the border has gotten closer and closer – and basically now exists in front of an American’s nose.  For a decade now, I’ve been snarking that the first lesson on day one of California driving school is “there are no other cars on the road” and I stand by it. But there are also no other people on the train platform. There certainly aren’t any signs saying “No Smoking” or “Dismount Zone” or “Walk Your Bike.” There definitely aren’t any people getting off the train when you’re trying to get onto it – or while you’re standing idly in the doorway. And there absolutely isn’t another car at the four-way stop, especially one that was there before you.  And even if you do notice these things, it’s okay, because you were in a hurry, so you had to drive your car down the bike lane or ride your bike on the VTA platform or blow through the red light to make a left into pedestrian traffic or walk through the big red DON’T WALK sign underneath the green light.

The principal achievement of American life and culture in the 21st century has been to make it more solipsistic than was ever before possible.  The proliferation of media means you can now see exactly what you want without ever encountering a dissenting opinion or distressing fact. Entire online ecosystems now exist to tell you how right you are, to affirm everything you believe and allow you to freely and anonymously lash out at anyone with the temerity to be different. The main effect of a device that can transmit all the world’s knowledge into the palm of your hand has been to get between you and anything you don’t want to bother noticing.

It cuts both ways. On the one hand, that lonely geek kid in a hick town in Alabama now has access to a wider world around him and knows there’s something else.  On the other hand, his relatives can now bombard everyone they know with a thousand email forwards, each more bogus than the last, giving each other the incontrovertible factual proof that a Muslim atheistic socialist theocrat has taken over and is persecuting Christians. (Sidenote: I disrespect any American Christian who claims they’re being persecuted when believers in Syria and Iraq are literally being ordered to convert to Islam at the point of an AK, but that’s a different post.) Conspiracy-mongers, outright racists, people with behaviors and beliefs that would have been socially abhorrent even twenty years ago – all have found mutually reinforcing support and validation through five hundred channels of TV and unlimited bandwidth.

(Aside: that’s what drives me nuts about the misuse of things like “civil disobedience” and the First Amendment. When those folks went to jail in Birmingham, they were dressed in their Sunday best, and they went along without a fight, because they knew they were breaking the law and they accepted the consequences.  Now people say stupid shit and scream “First Amendment” without realizing that it guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence.  You want to dress like a circus clown? Don’t bitch when people stare.  You want to make a spectacle of yourself on TV and radio and Twitter? Don’t bitch when you get taken off the air.)

It doesn’t help that one of our two political parties is driven entirely by the ethos of “I Got Mine – Fuck You.” That’s the libertarian ethic at its most distilled, the idea that it should be possible to shuffle your money through two other countries and pay no taxes, or that you should be able to go armed and pick a fight and blow somebody away without consequence, or that your private shuttle should have the free use of public bus stops and that you should be able to resell your public parking space for profit.  I got mine, fuck you. And everyone who reads Atlas Shrugged and decides that it means them – they are the special ones, they are John Galt, they are the uniquely gifted and talented and the backbone of society as opposed to those looters and moochers who have the temerity not to have been born on third base – just feeds the beast.  I got mine, fuck you. 

In a way, I guess it was inevitable. The baby boomers were the original Me Generation, and they raised a critical mass of kids with a wall full of participation ribbons and helicoptered in to complain about grades and playing time.  It’s not lost on me that the bulk of bad actors on local transit are headed back to San Francisco in the afternoon, where a whole world is being carved out in “the Quad” so you can be bused back and forth to your job and have a hip edgy urban lifestyle in between.   Hannah Hart was being satirical about “adultolescence”. I don’t think these kids are.  So if you want to dress up like you woke up drunk in a Goodwill donation bin, go ahead, do your thing.  But be prepared for people not to take you seriously. If you want to go to work dressed for wake-and-bake in the dorm common room, go on with your bad self, but prepare to be judged. This might be the most casual place on Earth, but it’s not too much to expect things like clean and sort-of matching clothes in a professional environment. Respect for other people suggests that your teal V-neck with a fountain of chest hair doesn’t really pair with your faded brick red drainpipe jeans, which probably ought not be pegged with your Toms – but at the very least, I’ll be damned if you can help me pick out a shirt.  But hey, if the VC doesn’t care, do your thing.

Which is the trick. I ask “do you know there’s other people?” and immediately get asked “do YOU know there’s other people?”  It’s the age-old intolerance trap: if you don’t tolerate my intolerance, you yourself are intolerant and lose all moral standing.  But here’s the thing: we live in a society. We have to rub along or the whole thing falls apart eventually. If you insist on “I got mine, fuck you” and everyone else does too, you wind up with that libertarian paradise of Somalia. And while I’m sure that’s the perpetual wet dream of the people who want to need the guns, it’s no kind of a society.  If we’re going to survive, everybody’s going to have to accept that you have to nudge over and make room for the next guy.  Including those who want to freeload off the tolerance of others.

In essence, there it is: the Golden Rule rewritten for the 21st century. And we need it. Damn near everything that’s wrong with American society in 2014 can be nailed down to the disposal of any sense of empathy, the abandonment of any concept of community deeper than “people I agree with on Facebook”, and the refusal to acknowledge that somebody somewhere might be different and that’s all right.

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