11 Comments

The gulf between the end of everything and our everyday knowledge of it is purposeful and is at least as evil as the weapons themselves. Another cogent piece screaming for a wider audience.

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"But when I write about what I see as the actual greatest threat to our world, it’s like yelling into the wind. People don’t want to hear it. My words get swallowed up by a big black hole in the ground and their energy just kind of fizzles."

Welcome to the club!

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You are a fantastic writer. Intelligent and witty as always. Thanks for the great newsletter.

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Thanks Caitlin, I enjoy your work. However, the profundity of this thought exercise is not resonating for me and I don't think it should for anyone else. I would argue the thousands of Americans who live each morning normally and then die in a gun crime later that day - with the same type of tragic obliviousness you describe - makes this thought experiment not so meaningful. Waking up, laughing, getting pissed, texting, then getting killed is something real people actually experience in vast numbers and assigning this type of existential dread to the governmental boogie man is not productive. It's been explored in lots of fiction before anyway. I think the premise here is that our priorities are all wrong - we trust evil people and waste time demonizing each other. But the utility of "being woke" (and I don't mind using a term that triggers people) is that abstract problems are not as important as tangible, everyday ones. I don't think this piece advances the health of our society.

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