The first step in making society better is caring about things that don’t impact you directly

The other day, a friend posted a quote to social media: “The first step in making society better is caring about things that don’t impact you directly.”

I love this. I have been saying a version of this for years. I feel this, deeply, at my very core. I give a shit about other people and their welfare.

It’s been really heartbreaking for me to come to terms with the fact that a lot of people simply don’t care what happens to others. They have a very narrow view of what “better” means and it does not include everyone. I do not know how to even begin to address changing that.

Caring about things that don’t impact you directly requires the ability to see beyond your own immediate desires, and to understand that there are certain big-picture things that need to happen in a society in order for it to continue functioning long-term. Critical thinking skills are required.

Here is a great example of this: School taxes. Before Doc and I had kids, we happily paid school taxes each year to fund our local public schools. Why were we pleased to do this, when we didn’t have kids? Weren’t we just using OUR hard earned money to pay for OTHER peoples’ education? Well, yes. Having a well-educated next generation benefits us ALL. Those are the people that are going to be running things in a few years. I want them to be smart, possess critical thinking skills, understand historical context, and just basically have an awareness that a very big, very diverse world exists beyond themselves.

But tell that to Texas and Elon Musk, in whose eyes having a largely uneducated populace that doesn’t question the status quo is a GREAT way for him to fill his factories with low-paid workers, thus continuing to line his already-illegally-rich pockets. (See also the movie “Idiocracy,” which was not supposed to be a documentary.)

For folks like Musk (and Trump, for that matter), there is no such thing as “enough.” He already has everything he could ever possibly need or want. So the only thing left to acquire is power. Life has become this game, where he’s lost all sense of humanity and the only thing keeping him from jumping off a cliff from boredom is to treat the world like it’s his very own chess game, with 9 billion pawns to move around as he pleases, in hopes he will eventually somehow “win.”

I’m pretty sure winning, for him, means that most of us lose.

I don’t know if any of that really makes coherent sense. I get so wrapped up in how all this stuff is interconnected, and the awful consequences of everything that is currently happening, and how deliberately cruel it all is, that my squishy heart and overly empathetic mind just has trouble processing it. I try to write about it but I end up going off on tangents because there is SO MUCH that I am angry about. Trying to stay on track, I already deleted whole sections from this post about trans rights and how women are viewed as scary magical objects to be dominated at all costs. I’ll write about that later.