There's Always a Reason Nothing Can Change and Nothing You Do Matters

Our media produces a nonstop torrent of ready-made takes and reporting justifying inaction and indifference.

Have you ever noticed there’s always a reason nothing can change and nothing you do matters? 

Have you ever noticed that nothing is urgent, and everything is constrained by forces outside of powerful people's control? That everything is a technical issue to be sorted out by the smart kids later on—fraught, nuanced, too steeped in inscrutable history for your tiny mind? Have you ever noticed that meaningful protests always backfire and the tactics are always flawed and counterproductive? Have you ever noticed that nothing you do can ever really change anything? That it’s probably best if your political activity is confined to pulling a voting lever every two years, 501c3 donations and consumption?

Legacy media, partisan media, media funded by the rich is—with notable exception—animated not by a desire to expose wrongdoing or produce useful information, but to manufacture talking points, nuggets of superficially-sounding truisms and thought memes about why politics is best left to the professionals. Most “foreign policy” reporters and pundits, especially, are motivated by the creation, repetition, and dissemination of these talking points, these thought memes, these Reasons Nothing Can Change and Nothing You Do Matters. 

Don’t use the word genocide—it’s not technically accurate. 

And even if it is accurate, Biden is working hard to get a ceasefire anyway.

And even if he’s not actually working for a ceasefire but simply renamed a “temporary pause” a “ceasefire” and still supports the vague objective of “eliminating Hamas” no matter the carnage, he can’t actually end the war anyway even if he wants to.

And even if he could end the war, it’s politically bad for him to do so. Wait, no, it’s politically unimportant. 

And even if it’s not politically bad or unimportant, civilian deaths have reduced anyway, so what’s the point? Also, didn’t you hear the UN “lowered the count of women and children killed in Gaza”? 

Wait, they didn’t actually do this? Okay, well it’s already out there so it doesn’t matter. It feels true, it feels like the number is too high and brown people are shifty and untrustworthy. 

And even if civilian deaths haven’t gone down and the UN didn’t actually lower its count, Hamas can’t remain in power anyway. This is just a pat thing to say, right? Sounds anodyne enough?  Okay, so you want Hamas to remain in power? You’re pro-Hamas?

There was a ceasefire on October 6.

Terrorist, terrorist, terrorist.

Free the hostages.

Hostages. 

Ceasefire on October 6.

How can Israel have a ceasefire with terrorists? Wait, it’s happened before, over a dozen times? 

Look, Biden is doing all he can to broker a ceasefire which, I know I just said was impossible, and also said he was powerless to do. Unless he does it then he’s not. Look, we can’t really impact Israel, Biden is mostly a spectator, but also it’s important he and Congress send Israel another $26 billion in weapons.

What about Darfur? Haiti? Tigray? These are things, no? I just googled “war crimes going on rn” and this came up and despite never mentioning them before I think we should bring them up. But the US isn’t giving these genocidal regimes billions a year in weapons? Yes, but Hamas, Terror, Hostages, Darfur, Iran, Houthis are violating maritime law. 

Shocked and horrified but what they see on their social media timelines on a daily basis, and the US’s direct role in it, there’s tremendous professional incentive in our media to come in and explain away, redirect, justify, and cast doubt on the obvious conclusion that this has to stop, that it simply cannot go on. Because it won’t stop, it’s bipartisan consensus—the powers that be decided it has to go on and there’s an election to win in November. There is thus a buyer’s market, and has been for the past seven months, for reporting and opinion pieces to explain why Nothing Can Change and Nothing You Do Matters. 

It all seems a touch convenient—contrived, pat, automated—that tens of millions of people, representing the consensus of global opinion and every human rights organization and health and aid organization on Earth, could be this helpless in the face of unrelenting slaughter carried out by our government and its ally. It’s strange that so much ink has been spilled creating URLs, news segments, and surveys people can share, McArguments ready to serve waiting for the average person to grab as they stay warm under the New York Times and Atlantic heat lamp. All to redirect your outrage, dull your moral intuition, stem popular anger.

So our anger never goes anywhere. It just bottles up, only leaking every now and then via atomized, unfocused, discrete social media posts—because, ultimately, we are not only helpless, but helpless and alone. And an entire media ecosystem is built around making us feel this way. We’re allowed to be “informed” in the sense that we are being vaguely kept in the loop of what power has already decided. In the vein of NPR or the Economist, we are flattered, told we are In The Know, we are smart. But we are not told to actually do anything about it, and we definitely should never get angry. Those working in the thought meme industrial complex don’t look at it that way themselves, of course. No, the conservative ideological work is done under more noble sounding auspices like “objectivity,” “helping defeat Trump,” “deferring to experts,” “keeping the temperature down.” And then there’s the overarching, religious-like need to morally index “autocracies” and “democracies,” baddie countries and flawed-but-liberal free ones like ours—which, of course cannot be on the same moral plane as Russia and China by definition. That we would assist and arm a genocide is impossible, and even if it wasn’t, I’m sure our elected officials—and above all, you—are powerless to do anything to stop it. Which works out well for those in charge.