Apathy used to really make me physically angry. I would have conversations with people and I would say, “What do you think about this proposition or that candidate or this time in history.” Then a person would say something like, “I’m not really that political.” So maybe it wasn’t so much a conversation, but an interrogation and then I would think, what kind of insaneness is this, a person lives in a place where they have the right to be informed and they are choosing not to be ignorant. I thought how un-American these individuals are they don’t deserve to have their freedom. When schools get cut and jobs disappear, well good for them, because by not making a decision they have made a decision.

I felt I was open-minded, because I never thought that a person had to think like me, but I believed that they did have to think, so I thought look at me this open-minded person able to break bread even with a Republican, a party who at the time I believed was truly evil.

But then I realized I wasn’t exactly being open-minded, because there are more than two choices, there are three the third of which is the no choice at all option. Foul you say, someone has to make a choice, no they do not. In America you don’t have to make a choice at all. With all this talk about the amendments and what they do and do not mean, does the Second Amendment mean you can have a gun, does the First Amendment include the electronic media, people have forgotten one of the most important principles of the United States, stated in our founding document the Declaration of Independence which is the little clause “Pursuit of Happiness”. This means that anyone can do whatever the hell they want as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else’s pursuit of happiness.

----“But Teka by people not making a decision, doesn’t that indirectly affect all us.” No silly bird, America is a society based on the “me”, not the “we”, if it were a “we” based society then in a complicated a way, a no action would be an action, but in a “me” based society, it just says, “Hey I’m just here man.”----

And doing what you want includes doing nothing. If you want to stay ignorant, that is your right as an American citizen. If you want to wear Uggs with every outfit, if you think 150 dollars is an acceptable price to pay for a velour sweat suit, because it says Juicy Couture on the ass of it, that’s just fabulous, if you think that Jennifer Aniston is an excellent role model for young women, how pleasant, if you think believing that Bush is a good Christian who could never lie, and that going to school forever and getting that PHD is going to add up to you and having the American Dream, then all of those things are super cool, because this is America and in America you have the right to be a tool, regardless of what anyone thinks.

In America your happiness is what is important, so gratify yourself immediately at your heart’s content, because in America it is your inalienable right to do what makes you happy as long as you don’t cause anyone else any problems. I didn’t get that. Corporate America is America and that’s why they provide us the American public with so many fun ways to give our selves pleasure. We have the right to eat healthy greased soaked hamburgers wrapped in lettuce, we have a right to keep smoking (this is one of my favorites), we have a right to never vote, except during the big elections where they might raise taxes to pay for those poor people, we have a right to never pick up a magazine on current affairs, to never question anything, to blindly spend every dime we have until we can’t buy anything else unless it’s on credit. America is based on our happiness.



So I realized that it was I who had it all wrong, I’m the one that’s un-American. In my selfish pursuit to inform people I forgot the point of all this, the point of America, to sell each person their dream one credit card at a time. Now I don’t get physically angry about apathy, I just get annoyed, because America isn’t about changing everyone it’s about each individual changing themselves. It’s about the “I” (i.e. the army of one, pull yourself up by your bootstraps), because the team concept is for communist.