Most people don't care

[710]

Or, more to the point, most people lack any appropriate emotional response, when confronted with energy, population, food, water, or economic issues.

I think this lack of emotional response is similar to the nature of women in the sex trade.  They are dead inside, from a lifetime of being used, lied to, manipulated, used, beaten down, treated maliciously, and used.

Matt made a post recently about how people don't seem to respond to certain information.  Like anything that might affect them personally.  Any of the messages that "the aware" (that's us) might try to give to "the unwashed" (everyone else) is met with what Matt called the classic American blank stare, which I called CRABS, the classic retarded American blank stare.

If the blank stare is a measure of intelligence, then CRABS is an appropriate title I think.  But the blankness is also a measure of emotion, feeling, concern not just for their fellow humans, but also that natural, selfish, survival-based concern.  The blank stare indicates not only lack of smarts, it also indicates a deep, yawning void which has few or no emotional sparks.  As if they're already gone, like a shop-worn stripper, like a career waitress with Marlboro lines in her face, already empty inside.

They don't care, because they are literally unable to.

Not dead, but never fully alive.  And we know what those are: the UNDEAD.  The Universally Neglected and Damaged, Empty of the American Dream.

If you get the UNDEAD response from people, pity them, say a small prayer if you're so inclined, and then get the hell out of there before they infect you, before they drag you down to their level.

The UNDEAD and CRABS.  Always be on the lookout, protect yourself at all times.

edit: extraneous and

[Optimus]

I see it everywhere. I bring up a doomer subject, all I get is a blank response. Maybe it's my charming personality.

[Chesire]

/musings  the average joe and jane simply lack the energy to respond to noise about impending doom.  They live check to check  worry about health care , child care , job security , debt , debt and more debt  . On an instinctual level they know they are simply one small disaster away from poverty and that alone is enough to keep them in a state of low grade panic.

In the last 2 decades for reference  the following things come to mind. By no means an inclusive list just things that affected me or friends and family .

1. The cold war
2. The savings and loan debacle
3. thousands of lay offs
4. outsourcing thousands of other jobs
5. The wall street crash
6. Assorted natural disasters to numerous to list
7. War in Iraq
8. War in Iraq version 2.0
9. War in Afghanistan
10.  gasoline up 300 % +
11. Y2 K
12. The rapid growth of a permanent working underclass . HI2U temp agencies .
 
Ad infinitum , ad nauseam  the american public is simply debacled out and can no longer respond properly to impending doom .Through all those things the machine has kept on rolling supplying petroleum and its products.  They can no longer respond because for a good many of them doom has already arrived .

[Log hauler]

                   Ad infinitum , ad nauseam  the american public is simply debacled out and can no longer respond properly to impending doom .Through all those things the machine has kept on rolling supplying petroleum and its products.  They can no longer respond because for a good many of them doom has already arrived .

                           This Is One of the Most, Well Thought Responses, I've read here in a long time.......... 
                           I was talkin to an "Old fellow" about this one time, His response......    "They Know Its comming, But What the Hell can They do About it ??". Kinda like some of  the rest of us here.
                   Seeing My wages decrease every year, Taxes going thru the roof, cost of everything else, Outpacing my pay,  All I can do, is prepare what little I can, "Hunker Down" and hope to "Ride Out" the rest. Worrying Myself to Death, aint goin to help abit.

[Lowblow]

Hostess  HoHo's, Jelly donuts, WalMaaaaaaaarrt, Mindless TV (Reality Shows gag me), Britney Spears, Target,  Borrow more Money, Dual Income no-Kids (dinks), VAcation to some other town and same scene, People spend more money on worthless crap and save the ecomony,  can't pay house note, walk away and have your brother buy house for half price, Richard Simmons, Obesity weight-loss clinics, bariatric surgery?, viagra, flip my condo, perrier..........................




sorry was in some mental mobius warp of distorted reality>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>KICK ME DAMMMIT!

[Nerdsie]

I have a sister who has occasional flashes of getting it. One day she called me worrying about the polar bears, for instance. I talked her into selling her LA home a couple of years ago and she is now a renter and contemplating buying again. In LA. Can you imagine a worse investment decision? I made a flippant, but fairly radical comment about the coming water crisis in the southwest. The look on her face was astonishing. There was a brief flash of panic/understanding in her eyes, and then that was squashed immediately and she looked at me like I was crazy and changed the subject to something trivial.

Another example, my mom recently attended a Matthew Simmons lecture for her job, and she joked about how crazy he was.

[mazz75]

I think it's like this. Most people do care but they don't envisage anything untoward happening. The guys I work with seem to have grasped that a crisis is real but still won't believe it till it happens. That's just the way it is.
They are often good hearted and that's what I like to see
Who knows which way the masses are gonna go but being part of the crazy shit is gonna be fun

Romero

[BenjaminTheDonkey]

Some people might feel uncomfortable about the choice of condoning killing people or else going without oil.

[thomasl]

Some people might feel uncomfortable about the choice of condoning killing people or else going without oil.

Are you talking about the war in iraq?

[BenjaminTheDonkey]

All fights over oil.

[dwheeler]

710 I think that cheshire has a point most people were sold a dream that has turned to night mare.They cannot escape they can't win they can't find an exit.

My feeling is a lot will just lay down and die.

There is a reason so many are on anti-depressants.
If you are outside the Matrix it's pretty obvious who is in a dream world.

[mithradates]

Agreement with most of what's been said here.  I like to add a few additional comments.

Firstly if median U.S incomes figures are to be believed, a huge fraction of the U.S population(~60%) would be struggling just to have the lifestyle of a generation ago.  Since the real value of median wages have fallen significantly over the last generation, the typical American family is poorer in 2007 than they were in 1987!  Over half of the U.S population do not make enough money to maintain anything approaching the standard of living that their fathers had.  Relying on salaries, they simply cannot sustain the "middle class" lifestyle.  And by "middle class" I mean the standard stuff(single house in the burbs, 2 cars, occasional vacations, send 1 or more kids to college...etc). 

But every commercial, TV show, or speck of media pumped into these people's heads always remind them of the "normal" lifestyle that they are "supposed" to have.  So what happens?  Most home-grown "Americans" will borrow, borrow, and borrow some more to get things that they simply cannot have, and they'll live like middle-class people for a while.  But eventually, the debts force them into a situation where almost all of their meager incomes go towards self-subsistence and debt payments, basically a form of debt slavery emerges.  So as we speak, a gigantic underclass consisting half or more of all Americans are toiling basically just to survive.  There is no future for them whatsoever, most of them do not and really CANNOT save up a surplus to have a viable future independent of the current financial system. And as such, their condition is that even a single missed check will ruin them.  The system "cannot possibly" fail in their minds, failure of this economic system would be almost literally equivalent with their personal starvation or death.  If a person is forced to live below the path of a dam wall, do you think he would be worrying about the dam breaking?  Of course not, such disturbing thoughts(while not being able to do anything about it) would drive most people insane.

Secondly, there's still another 20-29%(upper middle and lower upper class) of the U.S population who are not super-rich but are comfortable.  They do generate a surplus and can get out of the rat-race.  But here is the catch, most of their surplus is re-invested into this economic paradigm.  They are sold the idea that they could join the "elite" class, the top 1% so to speak.  It's a pleasant dream that comes with McMansions, fancy cars, regular vacations, and servants(if you live in the city).  While the dream is fake, the debts are real.  Their assets are largely tied into an economic system that CANNOT fail.  If it ever fails, if the growth ever stops, the upper middle class is ruined, their life savings would be gone and they would be saddled with debt.  Now of course some of them would be prudent and take risk-mitigation measures with their investments.  But as we know 4/5 of all people are genetically wired to be optimistic.  So even there, you cannot expect the vast majority of people to get it.  GETTING IT would mean realizing that your life's work was for nothing, that everything you have earned over decades would be gone in a short period of time.  It would be like someone(not a doctor) telling you, your son will die within the next month.  Regardless of whether it's true or not, you simply CANNOT believe it.

[canuck-girl]

Yes to everything everyone is saying here. It's exhausting trying to prepare yourself for what's coming either soon or within the next generation's lifetime and face such scornful denial and derision from everyone you know. My current priorities and actions? Move to a small town, buy or build myself a tiny, eco-friendly, super insulated house with a passive-solar design, grow a decent size garden, rely less on car, cut out all extravagances - including unneccessary appliances, watch my retirement money with an eagle eye, etc. .... pretty much what everyone here is doing.

As for talking to the sheeple? I keep vowing I won't anymore because of those ugly cow-eyed blank stares I keep mysteriously getting, but I can't help myself (I'm such a little optimist way deep down inside) when I meet someone who seems like they might have a glimmer of light in their eye, but I'm disappointed every d$%^n time. Even some of the people in my environmental group are Pollyannas, but I've been lucky and picked out just the 2 who really "get it" - they give me great comfort and we have great conversations. I can't make that connection with anyone else except on the internet and a sister who still lives in her Mcdonald's mansion and drives the gas-sucking van but who at least verbally supports my Peak Oil plans and does grow a big garden. All other relatives and friends, I think, think I've gone off the deep end just a little. The one that bugs me the most is my brother, who has 2 lovely little babies I'm doing most of this preparation for, and he thinks I've completely lost my mind. 

Close your eyes for one tiny moment, folks, and just imagine how great it could be if everyone in our society was on board. What a feeling of true community and security we could have as a culture with common goals.
(Okay, wakey wakey, now. Get back to your slogging, proles, daydream time's over.)
     

[mithradates]

Yes to everything everyone is saying here. It's exhausting trying to prepare yourself for what's coming either soon or within the next generation's lifetime and face such scornful denial and derision from everyone you know. My current priorities and actions? Move to a small town, buy or build myself a tiny, eco-friendly, super insulated house with a passive-solar design, grow a decent size garden, rely less on car, cut out all extravagances - including unneccessary appliances, watch my retirement money with an eagle eye, etc. .... pretty much what everyone here is doing.

As for talking to the sheeple? I keep vowing I won't anymore because of those ugly cow-eyed blank stares I keep mysteriously getting, but I can't help myself (I'm such a little optimist way deep down inside) when I meet someone who seems like they might have a glimmer of light in their eye, but I'm disappointed every d$%^n time. Even some of the people in my environmental group are Pollyannas, but I've been lucky and picked out just the 2 who really "get it" - they give me great comfort and we have great conversations. I can't make that connection with anyone else except on the internet and a sister who still lives in her Mcdonald's mansion and drives the gas-sucking van but who at least verbally supports my Peak Oil plans and does grow a big garden. All other relatives and friends, I think, think I've gone off the deep end just a little. The one that bugs me the most is my brother, who has 2 lovely little babies I'm doing most of this preparation for, and he thinks I've completely lost my mind. 

Close your eyes for one tiny moment, folks, and just imagine how great it could be if everyone in our society was on board. What a feeling of true community and security we could have as a culture with common goals.
(Okay, wakey wakey, now. Get back to your slogging, proles, daydream time's over.)
     

Canuck-Girl, I'm pretty much doing the same things.  Only one of my friends see it coming however, but 1 is better than none I guess

[Ethos]

"As for talking to the sheeple? I keep vowing I won't anymore because of those ugly cow-eyed blank stares I keep mysteriously getting, but I can't help myself (I'm such a little optimist way deep down inside) when I meet someone who seems like they might have a glimmer of light in their eye, but I'm disappointed every d$%^n time."

-Canuck-girl

I do the same thing... minus the disappointment.  If I care about the person enough to say anything, I keep it short and simple, one or two clear sentences.
If they bite, I'll give them another one or two bits and that's it.  If they're not hooked at that point, they aren't ready so move on.