Sick of Being Sick and Tired
Updated: Sep 4
Some people really should vacate your social pages.
This is not really about likes. It is about what it means to witness people doing the work and decide that your silence costs nothing.
Not because they disagree with you.
Not because they owe you applause.
But because I genuinely do not understand the point of sitting quietly in someone’s audience year after year, watching them write, build, advocate, challenge, create, and try to make a difference — while offering absolutely nothing in return.
No engagement.
No encouragement.
No amplification.
No sign that you even noticed.
Then, somewhere down the road, the very social problems people have been speaking about arrive close enough to your own front door to become important.
Suddenly there is outrage.
Suddenly there is concern.
Suddenly everybody wants to talk about community, justice, mental health, racism, inequality, grief, exclusion, or whatever issue has finally become impossible to ignore.
And I find that deeply hypocritical.
Because communities do not deteriorate overnight. People were talking. People were warning. People were organizing. People were writing. People were trying. You were watching.
There is a difference between being part of a community and simply positioning yourself close enough to benefit from one.
And increasingly, I have very little patience for the latter.
I do not need spectators masquerading as community.
If your only relationship to other people’s work is to watch silently until their issue becomes useful, fashionable, or personal to you, I am not sure that is solidarity at all.
It looks a lot more like opportunism.
And, frankly, I think that kind of indifference is part of the humanitarian problem we keep pretending exists somewhere outside of ourselves.
If this is where you landed, you do not have to stop here.
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