Some years ago, when I was doing graduate school, I used to have to judge speech competitions between different colleges and universities. It was mostly fun, but one event I hated more than anything else was persuasive speaking, which boiled down to ten minute speeches that pretty much blamed the audience for a problem that was destroying the world and how each audience member was now responsible for fixing whatever was wrong. It would go something like: “Evil pharmaceutical companies are making drugs that are hooking people on curing symptoms rather than the actual problem itself. This is really bad, and YOU must do something about this to make things better.” And usually they’d mention my responsibility was now to contact my congressman, start a letter writing campaign, stop taking drugs, or whatever. But it always came back on me. I was the solution.
Well, I never bought that. In that scenario, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and insurance companies are the cause. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: They don’t give a rat’s ass what I think about it. They’re not going to stop because I tell them they need to stop. My congressman is not going to tell them to stop because I told him to do so. And if I’m taking pharmaceuticals to keep myself from dying of diabetes, chances are pretty good that I’m not going to just stop taking my medication because it makes some hippy kid in college feel better about himself/herself in that he or she got back at big bad pharma by delivering a speech condemning them.
Which brings me to Noam Chomsky. It seems that Noam has a diatribe about how something’s wrong with America, and how Americans need to stop doing what Americans do and somehow fix the world. Sounds great. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Noam. The people who are contributing to the problem aren’t Americans. It’s the corporations that own Americans, their media and their legislators. Sure, “Americans” can change their ways and make things better, but they won’t, mainly because the ones that need to do the actual work don’t give a rat’s ass about the people who are being hurt. They only care about the profits. And as long as both political parties are part of the profit process, they’re not going to care either. Which means, NO ONE will do anything to make a difference.
And that’s the problem right there. Much like some freshman in college, Noam somehow thinks that shaming the average American citizen is somehow going to get that average American to take up his cause and somehow make things better, much like those underwear gnomes who claim 3 steps to profit, with step two detailed out as “????”. It’s a great sentiment, but in case Noam doesn’t know this, he has much more financial clout than I have, a much louder voice that people listen to, and so many more opportunities to make a difference. Yet, until I just read his article in Salon.com, I haven’t heard a peep from him about practically anything. Being a professional complainer might be fun, but it isn’t any more capable of making a difference than sitting in the basement and playing a full night of World of Warcraft. If you want to make a difference, you actually have to do something, not just complain about things that are wrong.
The real problem with America is that Americans are now to the point where they just don’t care. The problems we’ve created are so large and looming that it’s easier to watch American Idol and hope that the people we elected are smart enough to get the big things done. The dilemma is that the people we elected aren’t capable of solving these things. They’re not even capable of running the government so it doesn’t collapse on itself, forcing us into recessions, depressions and sequesters. Those are the people we’re looking to in hopes of making things better.
Right now, we have a large percentage of Americans who are more concerned about having a job tomorrow than they are about whether or not global warming is going to destroy a farm in Kenya. We should be concerned that North Korea and Iran are gravitating towards nuclear weapons, but we’re more frightened of being caught on the wrong side of town when it gets dark, because now gangs run freely in certain areas without any fear of being harassed by the police. We should care about the economies of small countries that have people in destitution, but when the majority of western wealth is held in the hands of less than 1 percent of the population and that the local police receive assurances from the Supreme Court that they’re not required to actually protect the people they serve rather than the government that hired them, there’s more of a problem that Noam isn’t going to come close solving because he’s as out of touch with the bigger picture as those who he complains about.
So how do we make things better? Simple. Make people care. But we don’t do that well because the organizations that do that are all about focus issues that are funded by lots of money. Not surprisingly, there’s no money behind “cleaning up the streets”, “putting people to work so they don’t join gangs”, or even “separate the 1 percent from the majority of the money.” When we do care and create movements like Occupy Wall Street, we ridicule these people and act like they’re inconveniencing us instead. To that, I don’t have a solution because unlike others, I’m willing to admit I’m just as much a part of the problem as anyone else. No one else seems to care, so it becomes so hard to try to care myself. As a matter of fact, it’s exhausting.
So, next time someone writes an article about what WE need to do, my first thought is “what are YOU doing first?” Quite often, the person hasn’t really thought it through, or more likely, hopes you just won’t figure that out.