Just care

When I started this site – pulling in a significant subset of my years of writing on Medium – part of my goal was to focus on the long term. To try to help people see ways to fix systems that don't work, rather than spending my energy and attention on the short term that worried me so much...because surely it was going to be short term.

Last week I moved over a couple of the pieces that were focused on the short term, and I'll probably move over a few more. And today I'm breaking that intent even more deeply.

We won't get a chance to fix systems if we can't touch them.

So let's be clear:

I do not approve of Trump and his administration, and can't remember a time when I thought he was amusing. I thought he was a delusional, unfunny bully with bad tutorials even with the Apprentice, focused on demeaning and degrading others. His second administration is geared to emphasize this specific facet.

I have taken responsibility for my own mind, in environments of pressure to conform, most of my life – and that is really this administrations only litmus test for labeling someone as antifa and terrorist. That's what they really told us when a woman who stated "I don't hate you," minutes before being murdered deserved what she got.

This isn't just Trump; it's all the people that support Vought's Project 2025 or continue to not derail this administration. It is the companies that decided to support him and his Mephistophelian cohort; little Fausts seeking profit and positioning as society burns down.

Their center of gravity is an agreement that people don't matter. They agree that it's not good business or government, to care about people in general. That's what they most want and need; for you and me to not care. And they are pulling every abusive trick to try to convince us to only care about the few people they'll tell you to care about. Their underlying messages: caring about people is evil, stupid, bad business, and bad government.

I need people to understand these things, deeply:

Caring about people is not evil.

Caring about people is not stupid.

Caring about people is not bad business and burdensome government.

Caring about people is the root of our goodness. Think about your last heartfelt hug. Did it feel evil? How about the last time you worked on something together, even as simple as fixing a meal? The last time Customer Service actually helped and saved you time? The last time a doctor was able to help you feel better? The last time you saw a text come in from someone you loved? Caring isn't evil. It's human, and our greatest transcendence. It makes life beautiful. If you're no longer seeing this, please: get offline. Stop glugging the designed information, don't look for transaction, and just make yourself available. Smile at someone for absolutely no reason. Then do it some more, especially if you're out of practice. Give this simple, painless, free thing without expecting return. When it is, it's all the sweeter.

Caring about people is smart. We overcome the problems coming our way – and there are many – by having people in our world who are working hard to understand, fix, maintain, rebuild, and build anew. The people who work hardest to ensure the context and repercussions are understood are the people who care about others. To understand something well enough to comprehend domino effects also means we need to care about people enough to ensure people have the opportunity to learn. It means we need to care about information and deep understanding, so we're building things that will function, instead of crossing our fingers, clicking our heals, shaking some totems, and hoping they might. A functional future is built by people who care more about people than profit; and, care more about understanding than getting the most attention first to stake out a spurious, specious claim.

Caring about people builds business that will weather mistakes, for the simple reason that people do actually see the business trying. If we focus on business providing expertise, it is all about having a bead on function. If business focuses on how much more it can take from customers than provide – which is the definition of profit – then there comes a point where continued growth of profits has to focus on tricks, dysfunction, monopolies, and moats so people don't have choice. That pisses people off, decades of loyalty sundered in an interaction or three.

Caring about people IS the burden of government. Caring that people don't easily fall into poverty (hungry, without shelter, without warmth; clothed, communicating, and mobile), illness, and illiteracy is how our whole stays resilient. It diminishes the potential for: mass die off from illness; societal and environmental poisons that escalate to killing fields; desperation that urges people to predate each other. Keeping these aspects diminished helps us see where people are predating because they think it's fun. This administration has been building laws and regulations that yank social nets, dissolve health bulwarks, make healthcare harder to attain, and are intended to put education in ideological control and further out of reach of the average citizen. That is HR1, the "Big Beautiful", in a nutshell, other than allocations for weapons, surveillance, and boots on the ground for military and internal policing.

This Mephistophelean cohort lead by Trump need us to not care. They need us so worried about our own lives, so fearful, so convinced we'll die if we speak up, that we stop caring about others. They need us to care about a smaller and smaller group until each of us is in a silo of one. They will even try to tell us we don't care about them enough to let them make their perfect world, so we can't really be caring about humanity. It's a tangled logic, and a lie. You can't care for humanity and calmly witness the dissolution of many for the whims of a few.

That's where we are.

Care. Feel it. Work it. What you can do will come.