Running Out
I think I’ve run out of outrage.
Nowadays, whenever I read about some inexpressibly horrible thing that the Bush administration wants to do, or has done, or is about to do, I’ll shake my head, make unhappy noises, maybe even murmer a couple of shopworn lamentations … but that’s it. I don’t call my congressman, or write letters to newspapers, or run outside screaming and shaking my fist at the uncaring heavens. Mostly I just go on to next thing. Maybe I walk my dog, or finish up that unit test I’m working on, or go downstairs to buy a coke. Maybe I watch TV.
This sounds a lot like apathy, but I think it’s something else. I’m starting to believe that we’re issued a certain allotment of everything when we’re born, and, once we’ve used it up, it’s gone. I was doing fairly well on my outrage inventory until Bush got elected, and then I started burning through it with crazy abandon. I probably drained half my stock when he won again in 2004. And now there’s nothing left. I can feel my outrage engine turning over, I can hear it trying to start, but there’s no fuel. You could walk up to me in a bar and start pinning Bush/Cheney buttons to my forehead and I probably wouldn’t get too excited about it.
It’s the same with everything else. Happily married people who decide to go their separate ways haven’t fallen out of love; they’ve run out of love. Jaded millionaires run out of joy. Inveterate mourners run out of despair. Romantic poets burn through life like stars, and run out of everything by the time they’re thirty.
Even worse than the profligates, though, are the hoarders. The ones who shun experience and flee from emotion and duck commitment because they don’t want to use up any of their supplies. So that by the time they’re old and feeble they’ve still got full tanks of everything, but have run out of ways to use it.
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