JULY 2, 2019
BEFORE YOU CALL OUT OUR HYPOCRISY, LET US REMIND YOU THAT WE DON’T CARE
by LAWRENCE WANG

Oh, great. Here we go again. Somewhere, something happened, and some people are getting riled up. So a couple of congressional representatives visited an internment facility and found asylum seekers packed into cages like sardines and forced to drink out of toilets. And then it was revealed those same congressional representatives were the subjects of vile, graphic memes circulated in a secret Border Patrol Facebook group.

Now the Twitterati are going to come out decrying the hypocrisy of conservatives who pass anti-abortion laws to “save the children” while causing lifelong psychological harm to thousands of actual living, breathing immigrant kids. A veritable deluge of hot takes about how the religious right have lost their right to the moral high ground, or how if Sasha was doing what Ivanka is now, Republicans would be calling for Obama’s impeachment.

We’re just going to get ahead of all that and let you know that we hear you. We get it.

We just don’t care.

Seriously, guys, stop trying to appeal to our conscience. We have none. Any semblance of something resembling goodwill to our fellow man was snuffed out when we accused the families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook massacre of creating an elaborate hoax and then terrorized them for the past, oh, six years. Or maybe it was when we lost our shit because black players kneeled. Honestly, there have been so many moments for us to have a crisis of conscience, and we just keep consistently plowing straight on through to not giving a shit.

Were we not clear enough? Did you miss the time we re-elected a serial cheater who misappropriated over $200,000 in campaign cash to fund his affairs and fly his rabbit in coach not once, not twice, but six times? Or when we almost succeeded in electing a pedophile to the Senate? Or how we’re still trying to elect that pedophile? Every year brings a fresh new resignation or indictment, but come November we’ll elect another blond-haired, blue-eyed closet conservative running on the ol’ family values because we don’t care about who they do as long as we get to rub our wanton lack of humanity in your dumb liberal face.

For a bunch of Ivy League-educated smartypants, you guys are really bad at reading between the lines.

We’re totally cool with the whole concentration camp thing, just as long as they’re not called “concentration camps.” We’re also fine with being fascists, so long as you don’t actually use the f-word. It forces us to confront our cognitive dissonance, and we can’t have that.

We’re the people that elected a man who advocated for violence against protestors, asked a foreign power to meddle in our elections, and was caught on tape uttering the words “Grab ‘em by the pussy” — and then stuck with him through all the high crimes and misdemeanors. Because he’s hurting people, and we want him to hurt those people. That’s the point.

So next time you think of pulling an Aaron Sorkin and whipping out Leviticus to show how the Bible actually tells us to welcome immigrants as one of our own, please stop. We’re aware of our hypocrisy. We just don’t care.