the reason people "don't care" about how an industry is killing people or harming things is because they simply do not believe you. you are the daughter who went off to college and came back with All These Ideas and society has a century of experience ignoring you
people would care about global warming if they had not been trained through the entire 20th century to believe that if someone is saying a really, really bad thing is happening, they are a daughter who went off to college and came back with All These Ideas
the vast sweeping majority of people in the world do not think that it is possible for really, really bad things to happen. you could show them a nuclear bomb with someones hand poised over a button labeled "DETONATE" and they simply would not agree that he might push it.
Almost all people in the Developed World believe that really, really bad things only happen in fiction. katrina was not real to most americans. earthquakes aren't real. 9/11 was, somehow, barely, just barely real, for reasons anthropologists will tear into in the far future
well. 9/11 was real because americans had been told for 60 years that really, really bad things can only happen if a Foreign Enemy causes them. that's the only kind of really, really bad thing that exists - an incident that can be understood in terms of a personal trespass.
most people do not accept that 15 years ago in louisiana, 1,800 people with thoughts and opinions, who laughed at things and had in-jokes, died because of malfeasance, because specific people did bad things.
people cannot accept that humans can be that awful, can plan to be that terrible and then execute on it, because human organization has long since outgrown the ability of our brains to comprehend the effects of our actions
flint isn't real because nobody has ever seen dirty water come out of their sink faucet. our public works largely work so well, and have so many people within them that are checking for problems before they happen, most people do not realize these are recently invented luxuries
you know that old bigoted saw, "we need a good plague"? yeah well, people usually mean "to purge society of undesirables" but think of the impact of a tragedy so big that everyone is reminded that tragedies are real and very, very close
the public in the Western World could benefit from a reminder that, as humans, we are at deaths doorstep at all times, and the real army that protects us is not the fucking pigs, or the fucking troops, but doctors and scientists and engineers
no cop, no soldier has done as much to protect american lives as a civil engineer building a dike or a fucking sewer designer keeping shitwater from bubbling up under our houses
humans have forgotten how fragile we are, how it takes constant, united effort at all times to keep us from dying of countless things, and that we have chosen to live in inhospitable places where we will die, unquestionably, without help
if they understood that, they would not have such a hard time believing that the actions of a very few could cause a tremendous, unimaginably tragic outcome
