In a recent editorial column, there was mention made of the storm of outrage concerning, of all things, inflammatory and insensitive comments uttered on Fox News. While some may not be aware of this, Fox News essentially makes a fine living out of the manufacture and distribution of outrage. Even though they have been proven wrong time and time again, Fox has continued to enjoy massive popularity by catering to the prejudices of the ignorant and fearful. This is not news.

The editorial was about how outrage has become a regular part of our daily lives in America, and why we seem to seek it. I myself have observed how every person on a soapbox must either walk on eggshells trying to avoid offending someone, or they have to carefully maintain a certain level of outrage in their audience just to keep their numbers up.

Why do we need this? Is there some sort of national epidemic of low blood pressure, which can only be treated by periodically making ourselves so pissed off that we have to grab markers and posterboard and bang out poorly-spelled signs to wave on the front lawn at city hall? Or are we as a society just so insecure that we have to remind ourselves why we hate certain things, so we can look down and say “Well, I might be ugly, stupid and unemployed but at least I don’t watch FOX NEWS, right?!” It’s very comforting to make people choose sides, especially when you can make them choose YOUR side, and it’s just not fair for people to have other things going on in their lives and choose not to take part in your little drama, now is it?

Fox News is hardly the only guilty party here. America is now neck-deep in a tsunami of butthurt that is threatening to permanently destroy any sense of social contentedness we may have once enjoyed. Everyone seems to be on a special lookout for something to be offended by, and they can’t wait to tell the rest of us about it when they find it. Every news item is no longer just something that happened – it’s a social commentary, a universal referendum on whatever your particular beef might be. I even read a blog about the Boston Bombing, and how media coverage of two white guys planting a bomb and killing three white people and injuring 100+ other white people, at the whitest sports event since golf, in the whitest city in America, is somehow an attack on brown people everywhere. I couldn’t make this up – someone actually took an event literally not connected in any way whatsoever to their pet cause, and somehow made the whole thing revolve around their personal butthurt. Was there nothing else going on that week? This was literally the message, that ANY media coverage of an event which failed to indict white people as a whole, was automatically racist.

I can understand the insecurity that makes people broadcast their butthurt, though. We all like attention. It’s natural. Humans crave it. Hell, I’m sitting here writing a blog about my random thoughts on life, and you’re sitting there reading it (thanks, by the way – it IS nice to be read). I can also understand how it can be a little scary to think that the world doesn’t care about the same things you care about. It’s kind of like being a neglected child – maybe the world has other things going on right now, and you’ll just have to wait your turn.

OR …

You could spin whatever else is going on, and turn it to bring the focus back to your own issues. How on EARTH can you do this with everything, though? It’s actually a pretty simple process.

You just make everything pass through three gates. The first gate is Racism. Racism is still a very big player in the world, and you can easily get away with tossing around phrases like White Privilege, because if someone denies it you can just say that denying it is part of their privilege. Yes, circular logic is still in play too. How do you play the race card on a non-racial event though? Easy – make EVERY event racial. Everyone’s got a skin color, right? Make that the focus. It’s as easy as simply mentioning the race of one of the players.

When you read the headline “Teenager Shot by Police During Incident”, the initial impression is on the victim’s age, and you wonder exactly what the person was up to during said incident. However, when you read the headline “Black Teenager Shot by Police During Incident”, the focus immediately shifts to the victim’s race, and the underlying presumption is that the victim was innocent and the policemen were acting out of racism. ANY mention of race in an article immediately shifts the focus toward finding someone to blame for racism, so that’s an easy way to conjure butthurt from any given social event.

Sexism is the second gate, and just as easy to play as the Racism gate. Any mention of pretty much anything involving women, or any form of sexual activity, is guaranteed to push all the right buttons in the audience. Because even though many people are of mixed race, pretty much everyone has one gender or the other so this involves you whether you like it or not. Passing through the Sexism gate, you’re either a victim or a victimizer, regardless of anything you personally have done or had done to you. No need to pick sides – you were BORN into an army, and someone just blew the trumpets.

The third gate is Religion, and even though the winner/loser roles shift around a LOT depending on your audience, this is easily the most volatile gate of them all – with one photograph you can summon the outrage of millions and unleash a poutstorm of apocalyptic proportions. This is what happened on Fox News, when they dared talk down to Wiccans by describing their religion as “compulsive Dungeons and Dragons players or middle-aged, twice-divorced older rural women working as midwives.” Tens of thousands of outraged Wiccans immediately took the bait, and fired off a salvo of letters and petitions to Fox News, who obligingly issued a rather noncommittal apology. Fox won though, because they got the attention they wanted – slowly losing their relevance in recent years, they wanted to find a way to bolster their sense of actually having an impact in the world. They succeeded brilliantly, the only way they knew how – butthurt.

What was interesting, though, wasn’t Fox’s game plan. It wasn’t the outrage or the pseudo-apology. It wasn’t even the editorial column. It was the REACTION to the column in the pagan community. Pagans everywhere were absolutely outraged at being told they’d been played by Fox, and ironically enough they wanted to express their outrage at the magazine with yet another salvo of letters detailing exactly how outraged they were at the sheer gall of some magazine telling them they were outraged.

Now, it’s become sadly normal in this day and age to have one’s day peppered with little bits of butthurt here and there. Who doesn’t like having something to bitch about now and then? It’s stress-relieving to have a gripe, and it’s also weirdly comforting that we can complain about First World Problems while whole countries are starving in other parts of the world.

However, as magicians, we’re in a special position. We have the unique (dis)advantage of having the ability to manifest change in the world simply by placing our attention on a desired outcome. Is it wise, knowing this, that so many of us are walking the Earth looking for things to be outraged over? Isn’t this pretty much an ironclad guarantee that, if we can’t find something to be pissed off about, we can subconsciously CAUSE an event specifically engineered to make us unhappy?

Let that sink in a moment.

I’m not much for bumper-sticker philosophy, but I did see one that really stuck with me. It read “Life is like a camera – what you focus on is what you develop”. I like that. It’s an excellent illustration of how we are the co-creators of the world we live in, and it should also serve as a warning. Those of us who walk around looking for things that piss us off are pretty much guaranteed to either find them, or create them.

For some reason, people seem to think we’re born with the absolute sovereign right to go about our whole lives without once seeing something that offends us, which is completely impossible. This is the Information Age, and our reach is more than global even though our grasp is far shorter. Many of us have never left our home country, yet we have at our fingertips detailed information about planets in other solar systems! With an entire world of news events scrolling past our eyes on a daily basis, we have the ability to find pretty much anything we want to focus on. It’s important that we start making the effort to focus on the social forces we want to amplify in the world we’ll be living in tomorrow.