“The last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die.”
We live in a plastic straw society. We’re hard on the soft problems and soft on the hard problems. And how you do one thing is how you do everything.
No, a straw-less society won’t help ocean life recover from the weight of humanity. A society that doesn’t allow commercial fishing would. The “science” is crystal clear. But that change, though literally possible, can’t be fixed with a wave of Instagram posts so we’ll pretend the straws are our conveniently convenient way to “progress” the cause.
And masks… wearing a mask is easy. So we project shame on those who don’t do the easy thing with life and death at stake. But after a year the “science” says body weight is by far the biggest choice that saves lives. Too bad… Losing weight is hard so we ignore the dead elephant in the room with our mask on for their safety.
And equality… it’s easy to let our most popular athletes have the difficult conversations for us. It’s easy for those athletes to partner with a mega brand like Nike to amplify their voice. The hard part is accepting Nike’s wealth and influence was literally built on the backs of generations of slave labor. The hard part is rejecting Nike’s sponsorship dollars and their products. Oh the irony is so rich. Black Lives Matter if they buy Nike shoes, but not if they make Nike shoes.
That’s okay though, because everything will all get better if we just tax the rich more. Raising taxes is the easy choice of course. The hard part is solving an infinite number of painful problems in the world for which we will be compensated in proportion to the value of the problem we solve. But solving valuable problems ourselves is too much work. So we tax the problem solvers into oblivion, making it harder for them to solve problems, while we wallow in self pity waiting for another plastic straw to blame in vain.