Things That Make Me Mad

There has been a lot of "noise" on Facebook this past week about "Bring Back Our Girls." I found myself feeling oddly unaffected by the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I think it's horrible. Perhaps if I were a mother I'd be more enraged. But to me, that is something happening far away from me and doesn't have any direct effect on me or my life or anyone I know personally. This sounds really self-centered I know, but hear me out. Below is a list, in no particular order, of things that make me mad that DO have a direct effect on me, my life, or someone I know personally.

Net neutrality

GMO produce

LGBTQ rights

Women's rights

Public schools and standardized testing

Factory farms and our food supply in general

US health care industry

Nutrition misinformation

The environment as a whole and the "anti-global-warming" nut-jobs

STEM ed, especially for girls, but also for boys

Patent trolls and US Intellectual Property laws

I put this list together quickly and it is definitely missing things.

Even as it is, knowing that I missed a few important things, that is a pretty impressive list of things to be passionate and mad about. Do you know what I'm doing about it? Absolutely nothing. Not a thing.

I've taken no action recently to fight ANY of those things. OK, I shared this video on Facebook, but that doesn't really count. Why haven't I done anything? I have some thoughts on that.

First, here is an article a friend posted recently that gives 8 reasons young people today aren't activists.

I propose a 9th and critical reason that the article missed. There are too many things to be mad about. My anger is spread so thin that I'm not passionate enough about any one thing to be active in the fight against any of them. If you asked me to prioritize that list I don't think I could do it. To me, this is the main reason, and perhaps the only reason, that I am not fighting harder against "the man."

I see this "too much to be mad about" problem as having 2 pieces. 1) There really are more shenanigans going on. 2) Social media and technology make it so we hear about more of it.

I am literally bombarded by requests to fight the injustice. I used to get emails from the HRC every once in a while that included a link to go sign a standard petition online that they would send to my senator. I would take the 5 seconds to click a link and hit submit. Then I started getting emails weekly, then more than weekly, and I started just deleting them without reading them, and then finally I just unsubscribed from the list. Facebook is covered in posts about all of the things on my list and then some. We know about so many "evils" that we don't know which ones to truly be upset about. It's a bit of a "boy who cried wolf" situation except that there really ARE wolves everywhere and my generation has decided that we're safer if we sit quietly and hide rather than running toward the danger.

Sometimes I wonder if it is all a "master plan" by the conservative right to befuddle and win the "fight" against the liberals. I imagine a meeting where someone says "oh! I know! Lets do a whole bunch of horrible things at the same time and then they won't know what to do! They'll be spread so thin that we'll win everything!" Then they brainstormed and came up with Transvaginal Ultrasounds and Common Core and the "fast lane" of the internet, and all sorts of ways to claim that they are not killing bees or warming the planet.

No, I don't really think that happened, but I do wonder how we got to where we are. I think that I like to imagine that room full of people simply because it would give me ONE thing to be mad at. If we could rally and take out that imaginary room of idiots then we could take back our nation and our voices and win the fight against all the things that make us mad.

Instead, I suppose I better start prioritizing.

PS: #ImaginaryRoomOfIdiots should probably be a thing. We could fight it.