I like to complain. And I think almost everything is stupid. I do. Mostly because I am still a disgruntled 16-year-old trapped in an older, mid-30s-something’s body, but also because it relieves stress to complain and think everything’s stupid.
And also mostly because I’m an asshole. (←That’s probably the realest reason.)
For example:
I think fanny packs are dumb.
I can’t stand people who get on elevators before the passengers already in there have a chance to get off.
I despise fundamentalism.
I want to pimp smack the next person who uses the word “attachment” in conjunction with “parenting” as if it’s the only acceptable way to raise one’s child.
I’m basically Aubrey Plaza on Parks and Rec 24/7; I just do a slightly better job of pretending not to be at least half the time.
The point of all this is that I get complainers and chronic malcontents. They are my people. Except when I don’t get them. When that happens, they are NOT my people.
The other day, for instance, I came across a social media post (or maybe a comment on an article?) wherein someone was complaining about our society’s need to turn everything into an opportunity to raise awareness (I honestly can’t remember where I saw it, but I’m 57% certain it was a woman who posted it. I think.) The thing that set this person off was the movement to paint pumpkins any color other than their natural orange — in this case, the movement to paint them teal to indicate that the people distributing Halloween candy at a particular house were giving away safe treats for kids with allergies.
But it wasn’t just pumpkins that bunched her panties. It was the out of control attempt, in her opinion, to use holidays and other everyday activities to raise awareness about stuff that other people don’t have the time or patience to give a damn about (my words, not hers). All this turning everything into an opportunity to raise awareness was getting too inconvenient, it seemed, and we should just go back to leaving everything the way it’s always been.
This teal pumpkin idea reminded me of a similar movement to paint pumpkins purple in order to raise awareness about epilepsy — a worthwhile movement in my opinion. You see, my son, Ewing, who’s 4 and suffered a stroke in utero resulting in hemiparesis and cerebral palsy, has a 50% chance of developing epilepsy because nearly half his brain is dead. And contrary to what most people think, epileptics don’t always have grand mal seizures, or the violent shaking kind that everyone associates with epilepsy. Sometimes they have absence seizures, or ones that can go undetected because they look like nothing at all while still causing harm to a sufferer. And a movement that’s geared toward raising awareness about this condition in an attempt to help parents and others recognize the warning signs and get their children and loved ones help before it’s too late to reverse any permanent damage or death is all right by me. Who gives a shit if somebody else is painting pumpkins another color in order to do just that?
Which brings me to the ALS ice bucket challenge of ’14. Remember how many people complained about that one? Many of them did so under the guise of caring about the cause, claiming people should be donating money instead of bombarding social media with videos of ice and buckets and challenges (never mind that such bombardment brought the cause more attention and money that it had ever seen). But if you peered through their thin veils of supposed social consciousness and promotion of actual altruism, what many of them were really saying is this is getting annoying to me, and why should I have to wade through post after post about this ALS crap on Facebook and Twitter when what I really want is to get back to the business of talking about how adorbs my new haircut is or how ironic I look in my hipster tank from Urban Outfitters?
All I can think when I hear people talk about getting “tired” of hearing about and participating in things promoting awareness about childhood cancer and poverty and educational inequity and disease research and [insert cause here] is How nice it must be for you.
[/nextpage] [nextpage title=”Page 2″ ]How nice it must be that you don’t have to worry about a seemingly harmless Halloween treat harboring peanuts where there should be none and killing your child.
How nice it must be that you, unlike one mother in my childhood stroke support group, didn’t have to take your son to a doctor to have half his brain surgically removed to stop the epilepsy that threatened his life daily.
How nice it must be for you not to have to watch a loved one slowly lose his faculties and suffer an agonizing death because of a disease like ALS.
How nice it must be for you not to have to take your kid to chemotherapy.
How nice it must be that you can put food on the table every day.
How nice it must be that you live in an area where the public schools have adequate resources or, if they don’t, that you can afford to send your kids to a school that does.
How nice it must be that you don’t have an incurable disease for which there is no treatment or hope.
How nice it must be for you to find people’s attempts to raise awareness about causes near and dear to their hearts and lives so annoying.
HOW FUCKING NICE THAT MUST BE FOR YOU.
We’re not talking about trivial things like slow drivers in the left lane of the expressway or people who don’t have their cash and coupons ready in the checkout line here (which is totally annoying and unacceptable, by the way). Complain away about those clueless assholes. Lord knows they deserve it.
Instead, we’re talking about attempts to raise awareness about real issues affecting people’s lives — sometimes impacting whether or not a person lives or dies. Are we so privileged that we can’t muster one more ounce of empathy for people battling a different sort of struggle than ourselves? Are we so inconvenienced by someone’s suggestion to let neighborhood parents know whether or not we’ll be distributing allergy-safe treats on Halloween that we have to lose our shit over it? Is there some sort of awareness brigade out there, forcing citizens to participate in these movements, and I’m just not aware of it?
Because last time I checked, each person still has a choice whether or not to join in. Last time I checked, it doesn’t take that much energy to paint a fucking pumpkin or scroll past someone’s ice bucket challenge on Facebook or ignore it altogether if it’s not something we’re interested in.
Last time I checked, it’s still OK to give a damn about something and encourage others to give a damn about it, too, without having to worry about how imposing or bothersome that might be to people who would rather not have to disrupt their lives of convenience and good fortune to hear about it. Last time I checked, it’s more likely than not that none of these awareness haters and privileged pessimists is perfect themselves — that they are also grappling with their own skeletons and waging war on their own issues that they, too, wouldn’t mind the world giving a damn about.
And last time I checked, this doesn’t mean I’m against complaining or finding things stupid.
It just means I’m against complaining about and finding things that actually matter stupid.
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