Heads Above Water: Why It Looks Like Americans Don't Care

The dad works from morning until night. The mom works from night until morning. The mom grabs as much sleep as possible, then she picks her kid up from school. She runs what errands she can with the energy she has. She picks the dad up from work. They share one late dinner, then she goes back to her job.

Two jobs, one car.

Imagine telling that family it’s their moral duty to resist fascism. Imagine lecturing them on their carbon footprint. Imagine telling them to start a garden or collect rain. Imagine telling them there’s going to be a famine and they’re going to starve in eight weeks. Imagine telling them they’re complicit in genocide. Imagine giving them an extra list of things to do to save the future.

If you spent your day getting yelled at by entitled customers and bossed around by entitled managers, then standing in line for groceries, dealing with toddler tantrums, and you knew you’d have to do it all over again tomorrow, how would you want to spend the one or two hours you had free? Would you want to spend that time reading about how screwed you were, and how it was all your fault, or would you want to watch husky videos? I know what I would want.

When you make your living from a laptop or a garden, it’s easy to forget how life actually works for a majority of Americans.

It’s easy to judge them.

Most Americans live on the brink of homelessness now, one car problem away from ruin. And it’s not just them. Everyone they know does the same thing, working multiple jobs, barely getting by. They don’t have a retirement fund. They don’t have savings. They have enough to afford this month’s bills. They’re keeping their heads above water. They’ve got enough energy left to fight the next data center or the next direct corporate assault on a family member.

That’s it.

We know these families. They’re our friends. They’re in the communities we’re building. They’re the plumbers and electricians who open up to us, because we actually talk to them. They’re my dad. They’re my brother. They’re my in-laws. They’re my readers. They’re not living in carefree oblivion.

They just don’t want to hear it anymore.

They don’t want to hear about protests. They don’t want to hear about boycotts. They don’t want to hear about elections. They might not even get a day off to go vote. They don’t want to hear theories about what they’re doing wrong and why they aren’t doing enough to save democracy. They’ve had it with all this.

They’re done.

I’m saying this because I think some of us need to come back down to reality. We spend so much time wondering why Americans don’t seem to care or why they’re not fighting back like the citizens of some other country with a higher relative minimum wage and nationalized healthcare. There’s a simple reason. It doesn’t take a team of political strategists or a bunch of psychologists to see what’s going on with everyone. In fact, political strategists are probably the least qualified group on the planet to diagnose our problems.

I’m in the laptop class for now, but my membership remains tenuous. I often feel like I don’t belong here. I come from the working class. I’m probably returning to the working class eventually, and I foresee a future where I don’t have the time or energy to bang out opinions online.

My brother works all the time. Like me, he’s finally rebuilding his life after decades of trauma. My dad spent his entire life working 12 hours a day and taking care of a mentally ill wife who hated him. He’s done. He has a few years left to relax. He’s not going to spend it trying to fix the world.

Can I blame him?

When I talk to my friends with ordinary jobs and ordinary schedules, they’re not talking about wars and scandals. They’re talking about small things because that’s all they can handle anymore. They’re squeaking out a living.

They’re not joining movements because they don’t trust the movements. Are they going to risk getting thrown in jail and fired?

There’s this thing called survivorship bias.

You and I see the Americans on the internet who have the time and energy left to run our mouths about everything. We see the trolls and the bots. We don’t see the ones who are just keeping their heads above water. We don’t see the ones who don’t have time to swipe and gripe online.

That’s the bias.

If we want to change things, that’s where we have to start. We have to make them feel safe again. We have to make them feel seen and heard. We have to start doing things for each other again without expecting it to trigger a revolution overnight. In other words, we have to rebuild the foundation of actual kindness and caring before we ask anything else of them. We have to build a society that doesn’t reward narcissists and psychopaths, and we have to do it from the ground up. We have to do it in the age of instant gratification and dopamine hits.

It’s going to take a long time. I’m not sure we have enough time left to get it done. Then again, all we’ve got now is time.

So, remember:

Every time we’re condescending and inconsiderate, every time we mistake politeness for kindness, every time we exempt ourselves from basic human decency because we think we’re right and it’s justified, every time we don’t do what we’re demanding everyone else to do, we’re putting a dent in the future we want to see, and we’re sabotaging the society we need to create.

The corporate fascists spent decades wearing us down and grinding us up precisely so we’d all be too tired and irritable to unite.

It’s going to take a generation to undo this damage. Maybe before we can expect the boycotts and the protests to have any bite, we have to rebuild the social infrastructure that made that kind of resistance possible in the first place. We have to build it from nearly scratch, with almost nothing. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to be frustrating.

So if you’re wondering why Americans aren’t doing more, that’s why. They work all the time just to stay alive a little longer. They don’t have time for gardens and book clubs. We could spend all day arguing about how we got here, but we’re here. Not everyone willfully signed up for it.

They were just born into it.

Heads above water.

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