In light of the comments on my post about THE JUDE TRIAL, I feel the need to diagram my opinions.
First of all, my comment that I don’t care to follow the trial was taken as a statement that I don’t care about Jude, or police violence, among other things. That’s not true. I do care: very, very little.
I have a day job, a child, and an oppressive mortgage. These things require the majority of my attention. Perhaps if I had none of those things, I would have more time to care about all the injustice in the world. That would explain why college liberals have time to attend concerts that benefit goofy stuff.
The following diagram shows my “Careness Level” as a function of my experience with a particular injustice. I’ve used the Jude case in this particular example.
The formula that defines my Careness Level can be written as C = Fc * (1/d) where:
C is my Careness Level (in Givadamns).
Fc is a “Careness Multiplier.” It’s different for every problem and is used to account for many variables, such as how familiar I am with a particular subject, whether it’s commonly discussed, or whether it involves nudity. This is how I can care about space launches, even though my likelihood of experiencing one is low. It also explains why I find the idea of naked space launches worthy of my full attention.
d is the virtual distance between me and a particular event.
In the case of the Jude trial, Fc is low. I don’t study police beatings and I know little about the trial in spite of all the coverage.
Jude is not related to me, nor is he a friend of a friend. We don’t have much in common, that I’m aware of. Along the axis of likelihood of inciting police brutality, we are far removed from one another. ‘d’ is very large and ‘Fc’ is very small, so my Careness Level in this particular case is very low. It’s not zero, however, because I believe it’s impossible to have a zero Careness Level once your brain is forced to acknowledge something. Like it or not, you’ve had to process the information and file it. You’re involved, if only on a microscopic level.
It would be possible for me to care more or less about the Jude trial. Person A would be someone more like me, perhaps a distant relative. If they were a part of this story, it would definately warrant more attention. Likewise, Person B gets less attention from me, because the dude goes around asking to be beat up. He probably wouldn’t warrant one blog entry, let alone two.
Does it all make sense now?
