Daily Verse | Matthew 7:21
“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

Wednesday’s Reading: Matthew 8-11
Thursday’s Reading: Matthew 12-15
Friday’s Reading: Matthew 16-19
Saturday’s Reading: Matthew 20-22

It’s Wednesday and October is already 20 percent gone. I’ll have you know my grass skirt also serves as a pom-pom.

I’m traveling for the next couple of days, so there will be no Daily Broadside on Thursday or Friday. That’s why the Bible readings are listed through the end of the week.

Every now and then I touch a theme and then, voilà!, I see that someone else in the blogosphere has written on the very same or closely similar topic. That is the case with my topic yesterday, which was learning not to care about what others think about me.

Then today (voilà!) I found someone had written on the topic of three little words: “I. don’t. care.” and I want to share just a portion of what Jack Donovan wrote. Before I do, let me be quick to say that I absolutely do not agree with his conclusions nor is this an endorsement of his site. He seems to embrace a form of paganism, which is at odds with my own Christian worldview.

However, all truth is God’s truth, even if written or spoken by a pagan. And Jack Donovan makes an interesting observation and then proposes a solution to the problem it raises.

His observation is that (my emphasis):

Most appeals in the name of social justice rely on an underlying assumption of universal altruism. They assume that you care if something bad happens to anyone, anywhere, and advise you to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering.

People react by questioning whether or not that stranger, somewhere, is really suffering, or if they are suffering any more than anyone else. They examine the circumstances of the alleged suffering and the motives of the people bringing the alleged suffering to light.

They argue about the details and the proportion of the suffering and point out their own allegedly comparable suffering or the suffering of some person or people who are allegedly suffering more.

Once you’re arguing, they’ve already got you.

Once you’re arguing, you’ve agreed that you could care, or would care — that you should theoretically care — given satisfactory evidence and argumentation.

I believe this is true. We are fed a steady diet of emotional stories every day on multiple platforms including television, newspapers, the radio and social media. Somewhere a child has died in the crossfire or drowned while escaping with their family to America; some black man has been killed while being arrested or chased or confronted by white police officers; a gorgeous supermodel reveals that she was groped by a male singer while she gyrated provocatively and almost completely naked with him in his music video a few years back.

Stories like these, as tragic as they may be, are meant to produce moral outrage that will move us to act. That’s why the Biden administration threatened consequences for the mounted Border Patrol officers who allegedly used whips on Haitians crossing our southern border. Actually, the Border Patrol officers did no such thing, but the moral outrage generated by the fabrication helped further cement the image of an immoral nation that doesn’t care about “migrants.”

Donovan’s point is that once the social justice warriors have engaged you in an argument about whether or not it is a moral issue, “they’ve already got you” because you’re implying, by engaging, that you would care if it is true.

Donovan’s solution is to genuinely not care about some stranger’s suffering. His reasoning is that there is too much suffering in the world and we can’t possibly be expected to care about every single person who experiences some kind of injustice. “I see all of this propaganda online telling me what is NOT OK, and how I am supposed to feel about strangers and other groups of people,” writes Donovan. “If they get me to agree that I care about these strangers and their unhappiness, Im [sic] supposed to accept responsibility for that unhappiness and do whatever I can to alleviate it.

“This is all manipulation,” he continues, “a political plucking of one bit of human suffering out of an unimaginable expanse of human suffering, all to serve this agenda or that one.” Then he delivers this shocking admission:

I don’t care what happens to everyone, everywhere.

I don’t care what happens to strangers.

It’s an admission that sounds barbaric and unspeakably taboo.

It does sound barbaric and taboo.

He goes on to say that he cares about friends, family and people “who are like me, or who are like the people I like.” He resolves this tension of not caring for everyone with the phrase, “Care passionately, but discriminately.”

When a Syrian toddler washes up on a beach in Turkey, the shocking images generate sympathy and outrage for the plight of refugees. There is then the requisite plea for us “to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering” as Donovan wrote above.

Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children, said: “This tragic image of a little boy who’s lost his life fleeing Syria is shocking and is a reminder of the dangers children and families are taking in search of a better life. This child’s plight should concentrate minds and force the EU to come together and agree to a plan to tackle the refugee crisis.”

Because of my Christian convictions, I can’t honestly say (or even imagining myself saying), “I don’t care” about that little boy’s death. I do. It was tragic. But I can also honestly say that it is so far removed from me that there’s not much I could do about what happened.

I break with Donovan’s final conclusion, where he writes, “When, free from our attachments to everyone, everywhere, we find ourselves adrift in a staggering, confused mass of drooling and covetous humanity, we can make sense of it all and find our bearings only when we form discriminatory alliances and new tribes built on trust, common interests and mutual admiration — instead of being bound by the great lie of love for all neighbors.”

It’s not a lie.

Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves and told the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate what he meant. The story included a man who was beaten by robbers and the Samaritan stranger who took care of him. The punchline was the question that Jesus asked the Jews after telling the story: “Who was the neighbor to the man who had been robbed?”

Donovan refuses to care about what happens to strangers because he doesn’t want to be manipulated by emotional stories that serve the SJW agenda. So he draws a very tight line around him that includes family and friends, and others he “likes,” but excludes others who may live right next door.

While it’s okay and healthy to detach ourselves from responsibility for every distant tragedy we may read about in the news, we must also be ready to be a “neighbor” to those strangers who suffer tragedy or injustice right on our doorstep. That’s what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

See you on Monday.