It’s hard to believe The Death of Outrage, a rant on the moral shortcomings of President Clinton and an indictment of the initial ’so what’ heard around the globe, just celebrated its ten year anniversary. The book was penned by William Bennett, former Secretary of Education during the Reagan administration and no stranger to dubious moral activity himself. It’s remarkable how much has changed in ten years; today outrage seems to be, if not the preeminent American attitude, at least very much not dead.
We’re outraged at a healthcare system where consumers have never paid more and practitioners have never made less, but even more outraged about potential fixes. We’re outraged our kids lag far behind in math and science. We’re outraged about everything big: big bailouts, big pharma, big oil and, perhaps most of all, big government. We have groups of outraged people in teabaggers, birthers, socialists, and religious extremists. We have outraged celebrities and politicians in Joe Wilson, Serena Williams and Kanye West. If you’re an American and you’re not outraged, chances are you aren’t paying attention - and there is probably a group outraged about that.
We’re outraged that big insurance is making gobs of money while people lose coverage at times when they can most ill-afford to lose it, but fail to do anything about the fact that we are collectively fat and horribly out of shape.
We’re outraged at how we have no time to spend with our friends and family because we are working our asses off to hang on to fleeting jobs, but only obscure articles in heady periodicals suggest that maybe we aren’t as overworked as we think we are which may explain why we feel like we’ve never worked harder for less.
We’re outraged that big pharma seems to be raking in record profits at a time when Americans are increasingly sick, spending more on advertising than research, yet refuse to accept that erections have a shelf life, some people weren’t meant to have kids, and part of the beauty of being human means having to cope with difficulty. There is plenty of outrage over Joe Camel marketing smokes to kids, but almost NONE about big pharma marketing prescription drugs directly to consumers. We’d rather be entertained by windbags who are still whining about death panels and coverage for illegals.
We’re definitely outraged about bailouts. Images of scurrilous banker-types skipping off to private islands on the backs of shady mortgages and tax dollars litter political cartoons. Detroit’s ineptitude would be laughable if so many livelihoods weren’t at stake. But instead of cutting our losses and being serious about figuring out something else to be good at, we’re trying to spend our way out with silly programs that are instead benefiting countries who are actually good at making cars.
We’re scared at how poorly our children do in school, but fight efforts to extend the length of the school year and complain about how much homework they do, even though their school year is shorter, and they do less homework than most other nations. We love to look at poorly performing schools and wax poetic about a government who spends more per student than any other nation, yet come up empty on what to do about a system that, for the most part, keeps kids safe, serves food that is probably healthier than what kids eat at home, and features teachers who, let’s face it, mostly teach because they love to teach. We wonder why we’re behind in science but still fight to keep creationism in the classroom, and Obama out of it.
But instead of having frank discussions with each other about complicated situations that require complicated solutions involving a blend of personal sacrifice and collective compromise, we immolate ourselves in hysteria. Instead of being civil and curious, we are hostile and smug. We’ve forgotten that most of life is gray and fuzzy, favoring a more banal, digestible black and white. Instead of being open-minded and contemplative we are convicted and inert. And maybe that’s where technology has a role after all. Maybe the promise of Web 2.0 will be that it entirely undoes Web 1.0, which was supposed to bring us all together, but instead pushed us further into our outrageous camps.
