You care about stuff, right? I’m sure there are causes you are passionate about. The real question is how long do we stay interested? Is there a shelf life for caring about injustice?

It is hard to keep people involved in issues long-term. Even if they are interested, the actual things we do about it are pretty minimal. Maybe I will sign a petition or go to a protest but I don’t spend a lot of time actively volunteering. This results in a disconnect between the urgency of things we know are fucked up and what we’re doing to make things better.

Causes are like fashion these days. Something will be popular for a while and then nobody cares. Maybe we assume it’s not an issue any more because we stop seeing Facebook posts about it. The other day I was invited to a “Free Tibet” event and I was like “Wait, isn’t Tibet already free? I swear I went to that concert…”

I have been thinking about all this and the NSA. I kind of feel like I failed Edward Snowden by not giving enough of a fuck about the administration being total creeps. Theoretically, I was outraged by the NSA’s polices of spying on American citizens and infiltrating personal technology. I am aware that this is just one indicator of the tyranny we are living in, and that democracy is but a faint illusion we pretend to believe in so we can sleep at night.  The sad truth is I was like “Eh, whatever…my texts are probably boring the fuck out of them.”

For those of us who aren’t terrorists or criminals, it doesn’t really matter that if the government reads our texts. If the NSA told husbands/wives that their spouse was cheating then we would have probably overthrow the government!! Short of that, it is easy to turn a blind eye. Which is totally insane.

That is until I heard my brother’s theory on why the NSA is listening to our every word.  Read this text and tell me it doesn’t only make total sense, but almost elicits empathy.