{"id":2156,"date":"2014-08-07T08:33:58","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T16:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2156"},"modified":"2014-08-07T08:33:58","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T16:33:58","slug":"do-you-know-theres-other-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2156","title":{"rendered":"“Do you KNOW there’s other people?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The paraphrase is Eddie Izzard, of course, during the award-winning Dressed to Kill, when he asks his American audience \u201cdo you know<\/em> there\u2019re other countries?\u201d And the crowd roars, because after all, Americans are famous for not really grasping the existence of anything beyond our borders. \u00a0It\u2019s an age-old story, one going back to Washington and his warning against foreign entanglements. \u00a0Fair enough.<\/p>\n

But the border has gotten closer and closer – and basically now exists in front of an American\u2019s nose. \u00a0For a decade now, I\u2019ve been snarking that the first lesson on day one of California driving school is \u201cthere are no other cars on the road\u201d and I stand by it. But there are also no other people on the train platform. There certainly aren\u2019t any signs saying \u201cNo Smoking\u201d or \u201cDismount Zone\u201d or \u201cWalk Your Bike.\u201d There definitely aren\u2019t any people getting off the train when you\u2019re trying to get onto it – or while you\u2019re standing idly in the doorway. And there absolutely isn\u2019t another car at the four-way stop, especially one that was there before you. \u00a0And even if you do notice these things, it\u2019s 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\u2019T WALK sign underneath the green light.<\/p>\n

The principal achievement of American life and culture in the 21st century has been to make it more solipsistic than was ever before possible. \u00a0The 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\u2019s knowledge into the palm of your hand has been to get between you and anything you don\u2019t want to bother noticing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s something else. \u00a0On 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\u2019re being persecuted when believers in Syria and Iraq are literally being ordered to convert to Islam at the point of an AK, but that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

(Aside: that\u2019s what drives me nuts about the misuse of things like \u201ccivil disobedience\u201d 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. \u00a0Now people say stupid shit and scream \u201cFirst Amendment\u201d without realizing that it guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence. \u00a0You want to dress like a circus clown? Don\u2019t bitch when people stare. \u00a0You want to make a spectacle of yourself on TV and radio and Twitter? Don\u2019t bitch when you get taken off the air.)<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that one of our two political parties is driven entirely by the ethos of \u201cI Got Mine – Fuck You.\u201d That\u2019s 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. \u00a0I got mine, fuck you. And everyone who reads Atlas<\/em> Shrugged<\/em> 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. \u00a0I got mine, fuck you.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Quad\u201d so you can be bused back and forth to your job and have a hip edgy urban lifestyle in between. \u00a0 Hannah Hart was being satirical about \u201cadultolescence\u201d. I don\u2019t think these kids are. \u00a0So if you want to dress up like you woke up drunk in a Goodwill donation bin, go ahead, do your thing. \u00a0But 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\u2019s 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\u2019t really pair with your faded brick red drainpipe jeans, which probably ought not be pegged with your Toms – but at the very least, I\u2019ll be damned if you can help me<\/em> pick out a shirt. \u00a0But hey, if the VC doesn\u2019t care, do your thing.<\/p>\n

Which is the trick. I ask \u201cdo you know there\u2019s other people?\u201d and immediately get asked \u201cdo YOU know there\u2019s other people?\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s the age-old intolerance trap: if you don\u2019t tolerate my intolerance, you yourself are intolerant and lose all moral standing. \u00a0But here\u2019s the thing: we live in a society.<\/em> We have<\/em> to rub along or the whole thing falls apart eventually. If you insist on \u201cI got mine, fuck you\u201d and everyone else does too, you wind up with that libertarian paradise of Somalia. And while I\u2019m sure that\u2019s the perpetual wet dream of the people who want to need the guns, it\u2019s no kind of a society. \u00a0If we\u2019re going to survive, everybody\u2019s<\/em> going to have to accept that you have to nudge over and make room for the next guy. \u00a0Including those who want to freeload off the tolerance of others.<\/p>\n

In essence, there it is: the Golden Rule rewritten for the 21st century. And we need it. Damn near everything that\u2019s 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 \u201cpeople I agree with on Facebook\u201d, and the refusal to acknowledge that somebody somewhere might be different and that\u2019s all right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The paraphrase is Eddie Izzard, of course, during the award-winning Dressed to Kill, when he asks his American audience \u201cdo you know there\u2019re other countries?\u201d And the crowd roars, because after all, Americans are famous for not really grasping the existence of anything beyond our borders. \u00a0It\u2019s an age-old story, one going back to Washington … <\/p>\n

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