The attacks in Paris and Lebanon this November have this country pumping its collective chest once again – though, let’s be honest, most people don’t know or care about the attacks in Lebanon. But the attacks – horrific, bloody, brutal and plain evil in both cases – are just another notch in a malevolent regime’s belt of bullshit evil. ISIS does this stuff because they’re part psychotic, part zealous, and part opportunistic. They do all the horrible fucking things that they do because they are evil, and know that it bothers the population of the West to do so.

It bothers us. It upsets us. But only when it’s a first world country. Oh there are those of us who get a little nauseous when we hear about bombings in Egypt or massacres in Africa or the rape and pillaging throughout Iraq and Syria. But unless the people being brutalized happen to be Christian, most Americans don’t care. Yes, ISIS has a hard-on for killing Christians. But they have an even bigger one for killing Muslims.

I hate to burst your fucking bubble, but those fun-loving, sharia law enforcing, murderous assholes have killed considerably more Muslims than they have Christians… but you know what. Who cares?! Am I right? They don’t believe the same thing we do, so you know… fuck em! ISIS likes to televise their killings of Christians (though they apparently record most of their killings because they’re sadistic fuckers) because they know it gets our collective panties in a bunch.

They know that there’s a very vocal, very ignorant portion of the population that has no will to educate itself beyond the spoon-fed  propaganda that their political ideology feeds them. They know that the other politically aligned group will call the other group out on their bullshit using their own biased propaganda. And they know that the two sides will argue back and forth and beat their collective chests while the government bombs and assassinates at will. And they will use our government’s lack of discretion to help recruit other idle or impassioned or psychopathic youth to their cause.

While we’re being arm-chair foreign policy experts, our government is deciding what wedding to hit with a drone or what hospital to bomb and glad handing apartheid regimes. While our politicians make fake masturbatory actions on the campaign trail, talking about how much bigger their cocks are than the POTUS and how, if they could, they’d fuck ISIS right up, our government is funneling money and weapons to groups that aren’t much better than ISIS.

The truth of the matter is as long as we can have our fake wars on a bullshit commercial holiday, fill our obese fucking mouths with another portion of Thanksgiving dinner, and watch the latest season of whatever in-fad-television-show is on Netflix, we don’t care.

We can change our Facebook images with cute little flags: it takes a little effort. But we don’t care.

We can thank the veteran who served and is now shit on by the government that put them in harm’s way for no real reason other than greed. Except for once a year, we don’t care.

We can pretend that bombings in Paris are the most fucking horrible thing that ever happened this year and ignore the fact that our allies murder people in the fucking hospital and kill children in the streets. We can do this because we don’t care.

In two weeks the Paris attack will be another footnote in the “War on Terror.” A bullshit bit of propaganda created to keep the ignorant afraid and the informed angry and ineffectual. Because in two weeks we won’t care.

And if we don’t care, let’s at least be honest with ourselves: We our not the good guys. If we were, we would have never let our government lead the world down the path it took. We are at best ineffectual apathetics, just waiting for the end of the world to roll up on our door.

Author: Frank Shaw lives in the far reaches of Utah where oil is king and dinosaurs once walked. He’s learning to be a home owner and wondering what’s next in life. When he’s not pontificating about politics, history or philosophy he’s discussing movies on an unrelated podcast and hanging out with his dogs and girlfriend.