Ambivalent about my apathy

Spring in Washington is a fickle time. We can have a warm, sublime day on Monday and be freezing, complete with hats and gloves, on Friday. That’s why if you live here you learn to seize the beautiful days, the unexpected gifts that let you open all your windows, go out in sandals and short sleeves, and think about buying a new pair of sunglasses for the summer. The guy who was the video manager when I worked for the tree huggers set the standard for seizing the beautiful day.

It was a late starting office, which is part of the reason my boss and I got along so well as neither one of us was a late starter. Even so, when it got to be about 10:45 and the video guy still hadn’t showed up we started to worry. Then, the call came: he wasn’t coming because he was “lethargic.” It was the ultimate slacker excuse on a beautiful day. No fake illness. No elaborate excuse. Just “calling in lethargic.”

I’m starting to understand how he felt, though, unfortunately, this understanding isn’t motivated by an unexpectedly beautiful spring day. I’m just finding it really hard to engage, to get motivated by anything outside a very small circle of people.

And it’s not that there aren’t things out there that are worth paying attention to; indeed, there’s a lot of stuff going on.

We just passed the third anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. Dozens of people die there every day in what our government continues to insist is not a civil war.

There’s the lovely and interesting story from a few weeks ago that revealed that the President has the power to add an executive rider to legislation that, essentially, exempts the government from the law the President has just signed. Nice, eh?

And what about our utterly schizophrenic xenophobia?

No, really, not wanting our ports to be controlled by a company from Dubai isn’t about anti-Muslim bias. It’s just common fucking sense. If we’re going to fight a “war on terror” doesn’t it make sense to have our ports controlled by say, oh, the U.S. Coast Guard and not any company that is controlled by a foreign interest? That would be any foreign interest, UK, Japan, anyone not based in the United States.

Then there’s the flip side, where we want, nay, we need the illegal immigrants to do the work but we resent them for being here and doing it so we want to make it a felony for them to be here. Could someone point out to the idiots in the Senate that the bulk of our produce is picked by workers who don’t have citizenship here?

Regardless of the hugely important immigration questions (like who would do all those jobs that the underground workforce does? like if this isn’t a place where an economic refugee can come to improve his or her life maybe, just maybe, we ought to hang a closed sign on that cast iron bitch in New York harbor?), who really wants to pay $10 or $12 for a head of lettuce?

And then there’s the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any floor on human absurdity (more on this later if I can but all I have to say is this: are they going to market welfare cheating, spousal abuse, and rampant alcoholism with the rest of “trailer park chic“? )

All of these things are worthy of attention, but I just can’t bring myself to care. Maybe it’s a function of too much input. Maybe it’s something that my uncle said while he was in the hospital (Why watch the news? It happens with you or without you.). Maybe I’m struggling with existential issues like how to make the most of the time I’ve got and somehow devoting a lot of energy to worrying about stuff I can’t control seems like a losing proposition.

Or maybe I’m just lethargic.

I know I should be focusing externally, that it would do me some good. And I feel like I should be paying attention. I’m not sure I know how to any more.