Grab a Chair is where reader questions get a full answer. This one comes from Lupatrian, lightly edited for typos.
My immediate family member, a white male: “I get the news that’s actually relevant to me at the gas pump and the grocery store, and being free to travel to both freely. Everything else is just political noise. It’s all just political storms that need to be ridden out, and they are just people in power using their power to transfer money one place or another. We have no power to influence any of that. So why invest emotion in any of it?”
My big zero-effect clap back was that I couldn’t bear to walk through life where my give-a-shit ended at the outside edge of my own skin. So I guess my question is, when people say “That’s just how it is,” how do you explain that there is no predetermined It? The It was not here with the primordial ooze. The It is formed in real time by our own actions and inactions, our choices. Short of shaking people by the shoulders until their stupid heads fling off, how do you convey the urgency of concentration camps, genocide, the resurrection of racism and misogyny, to a person who just can’t be bothered to stand up and say “No, that is not OK”? Or to VOTE?
It got heated. I said we’d never talk about such things again. So now the only conversations we will have will be fakeass fluff, and the weather. I’ll have to constantly carry a pillow so I can scream into it.
Lupatrian, pull up a chair. First, the line about your give-a-shit ending at the edge of your skin is better than you think it was. It landed with zero effect because it was aimed at his character, and nobody has ever changed their mind because a relative described their character to them. But it is a good line, and you should keep it for yourself.
Something else happened in that argument. He handed you something in the middle of the argument and neither of you noticed.
He said the news that matters to him is at the gas pump and the grocery store, and in being free to travel to both. That is his whole list. It is short, it is concrete, and every item on it is set in Washington.
The price at the pump this fall is shaped by a war with Iran, a naval blockade, and a president who posted on Thursday that the next round of strikes will wait until after the election. Diesel hit a record $6.53 last month. Heating oil in Maine is up 77 percent going into winter. The price at the grocery store is shaped by the tariffs the president has imposed, and by what happens to farm labor when immigration enforcement empties the fields. His freedom to drive to either place is a legal right, and legal rights are defined, enforced, and occasionally suspended by people who win elections.
So your relative is following politics. He is following it at the receiving end, with the labels taken off. He believes the pump and the grocery shelf are weather, and that the people in power are a separate storm system that moves money around and never touches the shelf. The connection between the two is the thing he cannot see, and it is also the only thing you need him to see.