A Sense of Doubt blog post #2444 - I Don't Know How to Explain to You to Care About Other People
It may surprise you that this Huffington Post article entitled "I Don't Know How to Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" was published in 2017 because it seems like something that could have been published yesterday or in 2020, the year the pandemic began (not to mention BLM protesting George Floyd's murder and the "Big Lie" of election fraud).
Obviously, this reaction comes from a place of anger and frustration with these people who quite literally demonstrate how little regard that they have for other people. Or deny that their actions impact other people and so they think that preserving their alleged freedoms benefit themselves and others who follow their example. But then, denying reality is part of the problem.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440
I Don't Know How To Explain To You That
You Should Care About Other People
Our
disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means
to live in a society.
By
Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue.
I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece:
I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.
I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).
I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.
There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).
But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.
I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.
The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling.
Perhaps it was always like this. I’m (relatively) young, so maybe I’m just waking up to this unimaginable callousness. Maybe the emergence of social media has just made this heinous tendency more visible; seeing hundreds of accounts spring to the defense of policies that will almost certainly make their lives more difficult is incredible to behold.
I don’t know what’s changed ― or indeed, if anything has ― and I don’t have any easy answers. But I do know I’m done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.
Futility can’t be good for my blood pressure, and the way things are going, I won’t have health insurance for long.
https://www.truthorfiction.com/did-dr-fauci-say-i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should-care-for-other-people/
Did Dr. Fauci Say “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care for Other People”?
Claim
In mid-July 2020, various iterations of the quote “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people” circulated, but all were attributed to Dr. Anthony Fauci:
Image versions of the quote also spread in comment sections and Facebook threads:
It’s not clear how the quote was initially linked to Fauci on social media, and it primarily spread in typed-out tweets or as rendered in the image above. But if it looked familiar, that is because it was the headline of a widely-shared June 2017 Huffington Post editorial:
I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People
Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society.
Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue.
I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece:
I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
However, even the June 2017 editorial above wasn’t the quote’s first — or final — form. In January 2017, author Lauren Morrill tweeted the phrase in the context of debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare):
It seemed the version attributed to Fauci was circulating as of July 8 2020, when Morrill lamented that more people had shared inaccurate attributions of the quote than had read her work:
We were unable to locate any iterations of Fauci saying “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” but even if Fauci repeated the quote, it did not originate with him. In January 2017, Lauren Morrill tweeted the quote. In June of that year, it was used as the title for an editorial in the Huffington Post by a separate author — and came at least three years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2110.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2308 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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