What We Need Is More Apathy in this Country
Now imagine if we could bring such apathy to Washington. You know how on the deeply contentious issues there are always a few percent of people who answer “I don’t know” when polled? What if we elected them congressmen? Then when a controversial new bill is introduced, they won’t launch into that heated rhetoric we all hate and will instead just say, “Whatever,” and go back to watching daytime TV.
And I know some of you doubt that people can successfully be apathetic about all these big issues. Again I remind you that you’re thinking this through, which is counterproductive to apathy. Look at all the atrocities people have committed against their fellow man throughout history without a second thought. It’s obviously possible to remain apathetic about really big things, so apathy toward the big political issue of the day should be easy.
So that’s it. We can finally end all this awful partisanship and heated rhetoric if we just stop caring. Caring about what happens to this country is what led to all these arguments in the first place, and I think we can all agree that no issue we face is worth a bunch of yelling. Freedom, human rights, the national debt — these are all just big noisy yelling matches waiting to happen unless we’re finally willing to look upon the big issues of the day, shrug, and go play video games. I dream of a day where no one pays attention to anything Washington does — including the politicians in Washington — and thus no one ever gets worked up by whatever Washington does again.
But wait, I just realized something: We don’t need both sides to be apathetic — just one of the two opposing sides. That’s an even better idea: I keep caring about my issues, but the other side stops caring so much and trying to stop me. That way, there will be no arguing, but I still get all the stuff done that I want. This is genius. So why don’t all those people complaining about the partisan bickering volunteer to stop caring about their issues for the good of the country?
Oh, the people complaining so much were hoping all along that I would stop caring so much about my issues so we could stop the all the heated rhetoric. I sense an argument coming on.
Considering the ~ 90%+ re-election rate of Congress and the fact that the president has not been impeached for treason, the current apathy level is already extremely high, it would take adding lithium to the water supply to increase it any more.
Now imagine if we could bring such apathy to Washington. You know how on the deeply contentious issues there are always a few percent of people who answer “I don’t know” when polled? What if we elected them congressmen? Then when a controversial new bill is introduced, they won’t launch into that heated rhetoric we all hate and will instead just say, “Whatever,” and go back to watching daytime TV.
Sorry, too late, Frank.
Q:What’s in that massive piece of legislation that you just went into reconciliation to pass against the will of the people and without their consent?
A:I don’t know, I never read it. You have to wait until it passes to find out.
Q:Um…it’s now over a thousand days since you passed a budget. Isn’t that like your, you know…job or something? How in the world can you go three years and not put a budget out to be scored?
A:I don’t know. Nobody in the media seems to care, so why should we?
Q:Um, don’t you think running guns to drug cartels out of the Department of Justice, where several hundred people get killed is a bad idea? Who was behind this lunatic scheme?
A:I don’t know. Again, the media doesn’t seem to care and here is a wheelbarrow full of documents, it is Friday night isn’t it? Time to paaaaaarty! Tonight’s Extravagwanzaa night!
Q: Greece is in complete collapse, Europe is teetering on the brink, we have been downgraded…and every budget, finance and economic expert says that entitlements are strangling the world economy, are unsustainable and need to be fixed. Why aren’t you addressing that?
A:I don’t know. Even Newt Gingrich is worried about grandma in a wheelchair being thrown off a cliff or something. Everyone is entitled to a lot of stuff. We just need to soak the rich a little more, steal their stuff and “redistribute” it through entitlement programs and a hundred million unionized government workers. Or something. I don’t know. Where is Europe again on a map?
Q:How can you make recess appointments when there is no recess? How can you declare a war without going to Congress? How can the NLRB tell a private company where to open a new plant? How can you appoint czars and czarinas to circumvent passed legislation? How can you allow racial intimidation and threats at polling booths?
A:I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Once again the media is not interested at all, so these are obviously not important issues. If you want to know important stuff, ask them. They know all about the Kardashians and Snooki and Trig Palin. THAT’S the kinda stuff you should be asking…not this political, wonkish, detaily type of thing. We get free parking and pensions for life. Isn’t this a swell job?
This comment deserves a wider distribution.
Suitable for framing, CFB. Very well done.
No budget for 1000 days is no big deal. But the Cure dropping donations to Planned Parenthood just gauls our patoot. Change we can’t believe in!
Very accurate and well said.
And scary as hell as society gets more and more dumbed down.
This is how the big picture has been planned and it’s working well for those elitists in charge.
Apathy got us 16 trillion (with a “T”) dollars in debt, it made us bail out corporations that should not have been bailed out, and it keeps getting us involved in wars we have no business getting involved in (such as Libya). I disagree. I think this country swims in apathy. It positively wallows in it. Just look at the presidential elections. You’re lucky if you get 50% of registered voters to participate. You’re lucky if most people even know the name of the vice president, let alone who their senator or congressman is. And this issues? Forget about it. Most Americans rely on campaign commercials for their information, rather than actually doing any reading for it. No, my dear sir, this country has been built on apathy. And that is why our Federal, state, and municipal governments have exploded in size over the past century. That’s why we have state governments giving union workers benefits we can’t possibly pay. And THAT is how you end up with people like Obama in office, a guy who never ran ANYTHING in his life, not a town, a city, a state, let alone a business (big or small). But he had good commercials, right? And that’s enough for our apathetic public.
Only with the birth of the Tea Parties have people actually taken an interest in how our government runs and how to stop it from getting even bigger. The Tea Parties have been the antidote to apathy, and that is why Washington is terrfied of them. The last thing Washington wants is to have the voters actually educated about how government works, let alone the constitution and why government is exploding at the rate it is. No, the Tea Parties are the antidote to apathy, which is why almost everybody in Washington and the mainstream media wants to crush them. Because, in the final analysis, wasn’t things a lot easier for everyone in our Federal, state, and local governments when the general public just didn’t care?
“You’re lucky if you get 50% of registered voters to participate.”
We don’t know what percentage of lawfully registered voters we get in elections. Since Clinton’s Motor Voter so many people have been unlawfully registered and the lists have become so polluted there is no way to accurately know who can lawfully vote and where. This, of course, is a great aid to the nice people who ride around in the vans assuming different identities at each polling place and voting early and often. The Democrats don’t want a drunk or drug addicted homeless person to vote; they want a name on a voter registration list so they can have someone vote for him/her.
In most places there are no valid checks on the residence of the registrant. The most common abuses are college students voting both where the go to school and at their parents’ or some other address by absentee and snowbirds voting in both their winter and summer places of residence, but it also takes other forms since establishing the barest indicia of a residence will allow you to register to vote. The USDOJ has stringently limited the right of states to purge their lists, so the dead remain on them for years as do people who have moved or for other reasons never vote.
If we ever restore a legitimate government we need to take a hard look at the Voting Rights Act and Motor Voter and the states should make a concentrated effort to restrict federal intervention in state elections. Like so many things, we threw the baby out with the bathwater in trying to eliminate Jim Crow restrictions on Black voting and in some states, it has descended into craziness with “same day” registration, vote by mail, unlimited absentee voting, etc. None of these things are truly necessary to allow a person a right to vote, but certainly are handy to allow the Democrats, and these are almost entirely creatures of Democrat governments, a right to commit vote fraud.
My memory may be mistaken but I could swear that those jackals, Cloward and Piven, were instrumental in pushing Motor Voter with Clinton. More names to add to the list of Enemies of the State.
We don’t need both sides to be apathetic — just one of the two opposing sides.”
The GOP Establishment is 50 years ahead of you. But they’ve got a little twist – they pretend to care so I guess it’s not full-on frontal apathy.
I’ll admit that I’m very apathetic about the GOP Presidential contenders. I’m fully with the ABO crowd in spirit but my body just doesn’t care enough about the GOP contenders to fill in the oval… that’s a lot of effort with a #2 pencil… now if I could use a wide-tipped marker I might be able to overcome the inertia. Nah, who am I kidding, I’d have to uncap the marker and I just don’t care enough to pull the cap.
If Democrats care, I wish they’d stop. Their caring is bankrupting us and resigning yet another generation of inner-city poor to a lifetime of poverty. Yea, caring!
Are you getting paid for this hogwash?
If you lack the depth to truly understand his deep thoughts, that’s on you. Frank was Time’s 2006 Person of the Year and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking plan: http://tinyurl.com/6yewv
Whatever, dude. I really don’t care enough about apathy one way or the other.
I heard you can’t truly practice the virtues without understanding the vices, so I’ve resolved to work harder at practicing the vices until I have them down pat, like second nature, at which point I will know enough to be really virtuous.
I plan on being a real holier-than-thou jerk about it, too.
this strategy is how the left established a stronghold in the first place
We need more apathy, you say? Who cares?
How can I leave a non-comment showing I don’t care about what Frank writes?
You’re talking about apathy with a capital A. Along with APATHY comes diminished intellectual capacity. Electing boneheads like this would—no! wait!
In fact, the opposite of Progress is Congress.
What We Need Is More Apathy in this Country NOT
Anyone who votes for any incumbent of either party is not only part of the problem, they ARE the problem.
You nailed it, Frank. It’s funny how our opinion leaders, our enlightened betters, have always and everywhere constantly talked up the need for things like participatory democracy and political awareness … until it actually happens, and then they realize they only wanted their forms of participatory democracy, and their sort of political awareness. And they inwardly wish everyone would shut up and be assumed morons again.
The solution is simple… Get rid of the parties..
How ’bout we get everybody concerned to take a Midol and lay low for a bit?……..
It’s not a bad idea.
Congress is at its best when it does nothing.
Just imagine how much better off the world would be if obama was so busy with his bracket picks, his body men and getting high that he couldn’t do anything else.
Even starting from the giant hole they dug, the economy would fix itself in short order.
I pledge to do my part, to create more apathy in this country. I’m a business man, if I can create jobs, how hard could it be to create apathy?
Funny! Next maybe you can do a piece on how many of these bitter souls need to get a sense of humor.
Whether we like it or not, the media is our voice. It is the means by which this country carries on a discussion with itself. It is the vehicle that determines what will or will not be the issues that decide the fate of this country. And the media, by choosing sides, has committed treason against this country, in the truest sense of the word: Treason – the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance.
The media represents the entire country, e.g., it owes allegiance to all of the country, not just that part of it that it decides is worthy to cast its lot with. And the media has done just that. It has chosen sides and uses its power to cheerlead and propagandize for that side while attacking and de-legitimizing and most nefariously, ignoring – the other, opposing side. And by doing this they take away the voice of everyone that is not in their favored category. They take away our voice, our means of influencing the national discussion. They have betrayed their sacred duty and betrayed the vast numbers of citizens who do not agree with their whims and pet fads.
Just ask yourself the question, as many of us do on a daily basis, what would the media reaction be if this were a Republican president? The answer is readily evident as it is within everyone’s memory as to what it did to George Bush – a basically decent and honorable man, transformed into a modern day Adolph Hitler in the minds of many of the bleating sheep posing as our fellow citizens. And were he actually implementing the anti-constitutional actions that the current resident of the White House is imposing, the media would have people out in the streets, screaming for his head, or at the very least, his impeachment. The media, every single day, would be broadcasting the speeches and attacks that the former Senator Obama had made against Bush’s policies and contrasting them – in the most unflattering light – against the blatant, bald-faced reversals and hypocrisy’s of his current policies. But no, they will not do that because he is one of them. And that’s why a critical mass of our fellow sheep will scream about the Koch brother’s and their influence but have blank stares when it comes to mention of George Soros or Solyndra or Fast and Furious.
The media is enemy number one and this country does not survivie unless something is done to bring them to account.
Who do you think voted foe mr o ?
All the same people who are now blaming him for every little thing.
“Mr. Fleming, I’m afraid I’ve been thinking.”
“A dangerous pastime.”
“I know.”
Exited about apathay!
First from my representatives — We need to appear to be doing something about X! Dude, not your problem.
Then from industry — We must lobby DC to protect our interestes. Let it go, beat them in the market place.
And finally the whiners — those libtard/wignuts are sending America into a ditch! Americans will take care of themseves. You take care of yourself.
I was so inspired by this column that I organized an Apathy Rally. The idea seemed sound, but the turnout was dismal. Maybe free doughnuts next time.
I am overwhelmed with apathy. So overwhelmed in fact that I don’t care who the republicans put up this election year but they get my vote. Hell I don’t care if it’s frikken charlie manson.
At long last, a study has confirmed what I have suspected for years. Conservatism is hereditary!
Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes.
The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.
Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study’s lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience.
Why might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such ideologies feature “structure and order” that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice,” he added.
Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments.
“Reality is complicated and messy,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies
I don’t care enough to be apathetic.