Get On With It

For over ten years on and off, I worked with children to the extent that I could tell you how old a child was given behavior and language. Children are, if nothing else, earnest little people who are always proud of the things they have learned to do unless/until they are told that such a response is inappropriate. However, under the age of 3, most children have very little inhibition to do what they want to do, and it takes very little prompting to do it. To that extent, I would urge the obnoxious “elites,” who claim to need all the resources because they have all of the answers, to get on with it, “it” being whatever good they purport to be “about to” enact upon the world.

Ever since Bill Gates and Warren Buffett made that stupid “giving” pledge in the 2000s, people my age have been acting as if these men are saints. This was the first clear example of powerful people’s words being much more important than their actions. It turns out that Bill Gates just needed reputational cover from Epstein stink as he bought up farmland to produce data centers for AI that was going exactly nowhere. Warren Buffett has spent his time just coasting off his reputation, and I can only hope that he dies with the same notoriety of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who remains the reason that an autocrat was given a chance to stack the Supreme Court. If billionaires are going to do something amazing, it is long past time to make that happen or be quiet: create the jobs, complete the wealth redistribution, fund the scientific advancement without hinderance–or shut up. In 2026, people have officially stopped caring about “intent.”

Likewise, the people from the dominant narrative, who claim to care about equality and racial justice, need to start actively demonstrating their efforts with something other than “meaningful gestures.” At what point does waving arms and crying into cameras stop feeling performative and become something real. Everyone around the world has been waiting for the “uprisings” that will supposedly come based on an “intolerance for injustice,” but no such morality seems to be in place. It is time for such people to stop delaying any structural change and either accept that inequality is acceptable to you, or that the system needs dismantling because justice cannot be found within it. Just as the mounting irrelevance of the Christian church based on hypocrisy, nobody believes that people really want anything but comfort if that is their consistent and immediate goal.

I have heard many cliches, especially since the “faketivism” of 2020, and none make my teeth itch more than the premise of “love always wins.” No, “love” neither wins, nor will it triumph over a world where the majority continues to allow evil the benefit of the doubt. People think they have an edge by claiming that we are all bound by biology, and I would affirm that statement by pointing out that responses depend on stimuli, and behavior is shaped by reward. If people want better societies, they need to stop enabling monsters who have done nothing to manage their own behavior. Either respect the people who play by the “rules,” or accept that imperially, we have no morals worth respecting. Extracting from givers and exulting takers does not indicate that we have an empire worth sustaining, especially as we cling for ease and comfort while the empire collapses.

No one cares that everyone wants to stay in their little bubbles of distraction and emotional numbness rather than accept the truth of what the empire is. We are long past the point of being responsible for making a mess, and there is nothing valuable about “conversations” and “thought exercises.” Action is the only accountability that people should begin to understand and there is nothing valuable about caution when much of humanity is at stake. In the words of Macy Gray, “get up, get out, and do something.”