THE SOLIPSISTS:

he point is, of all things, about Renee Good's mother, who we recently learned, with all obligatory respect to a person who survived the nightmare of burying a child, is a real piece of shit human being. I know that sounds jarring and harsh, but I'll accept the charges because as I near my fifth decade on this Earth I cannot overstate how fucking sick I am of this line of argument from this generation of people:

From Aaron Rupar's Bluesky account: Renee Good's mom: "I am a registered Republican. >I voted for President Trump uinder >the impression that these agents were here to >protect citizens -- innocents like our family and the others here. Certainly not to accuse >those of us here of being terrorists and take precious lives. This is madness."

This is an extreme example, perhaps, but it's one of the - perhaps the, full stop - fundamentally poisonous ways of structuring one's understanding of the world that has sent our politics careening into the abyss while millions of us stand around with that dumbstruck "What's going on" look on our faces like we really, sincerely cannot connect the dots between what is inside our heads and hearts and what is happening all around us. I want the bad things to happen, on the understanding that I am the beneficiary and not the victim. There is an out-group that power exists to punish and an in-group that includes some imperfectly definable class of people that doesn't need to be defined too perfectly because the important thing is that it includes me. Me and some other people who I think deserve to live with a basic level of human dignity, that's the polity.

How many times have you, have we, watched something like this play out with self-identified reactionaries? "I started criticizing where the GOP stands on gay rights when I learned my son is gay." "I realized the impracticality and unfairness of the anti-abortion ideology when I myself needed an abortion." "Single-payer health care is communism but someone please help me, my wife got sick and now the hospital is taking my house." "I voted for the white supremacist president to create a personal militia to hunt down the Mud Races and for some reason they've deported my Mexican husband."

Look, this is both a foundational, complex problem with our society and a pretty simple one to diagnose: If you think this way, you are a broken human being who was raised without, and never sought to acquire independently, a basic constituent part of humanity called empathy. It's entirely possible you are also missing its cousin, sympathy. If you cannot look at another human being to whom some misery has befallen and have it fire in your brainstem, even subconsciously, "That could be me or someone I care about," you failed. You're damaged goods. If you're unclear on what The Problem is, the problem is you. Run to therapy. Go find religion. Become a shut-in and spare the rest of us from your constant efforts to sabotage the collective. Do not tell us about your woes, about the big shock you experienced when it suddenly hit you that things that happen to other human beings can also happen to you. As the man said, fix your heart or die. My preference is that you choose the former, but if you can't manage it feel free to hurry up and do the latter.

This country - and many values of "this" work for that statement right now! - is in the midst of a deeply, profoundly ugly backslide toward the very worst of what we are capable of as a species. This is happening because many people want it to happen and believe they can pick and choose to whom it happens. The people who believe this are bad people, and very stupid people, and I don't want to hear their sob story about the personal tragedy that made the light bulb glow. Anyone who cannot recognize something as evil unless and until the evil becomes their problem is not really "getting it" in any meaningful sense. The kind of people for whom a crisis on a planetary scale is still somehow about them, personally, are not people who can ever be relied upon to contribute to a solution even after they claim to see the light.