Microstory 390: Attention

Click here for a list of every step.
Acknowledgement

Here you are. You’ve gotten people’s attention. They notice that you exist. Maybe you’re in the middle of a group of friends, or you’ve been all alone in the big city. Maybe you finally have a job where people value other people’s opinions, or maybe you have some new platform for getting your point across. People are paying attention to you, so you better not mess it up. What’s so much worse than people not agreeing with you is failing to make yourself understood clearly and concisely. This is your chance, don’t blow it. Mom’s spaghetti, as my local radio station personality would say. Are you doing okay? See, this is why this is such a late step. Everything you’ve been doing to this point in your life has happened to either help you live long enough to be here, or to prepare yourself. You have to know who you are before you can expect anyone else to get you. Donald Trump is a nobody. No, I’ve talked about how intelligent he is, and also how insane he is, but I also want to make it clear that he’s not a real person. He has no opinions of his own, or rather any opinions he does happen to have are irrelevant to the global conversation. Everything he says has been but one calculated and insidious ingredient in a recipe for success. You see, he knows how stupid you people are. He knows that even if he contradicts himself, his target demographic won’t believe it, won’t recognize it at all, or simply doesn’t care. If he says that abortion is wrong, enough pro-life people will decide to vote for him. If next week he says that fetuses are tasty, he’ll gain cannibal voters, but somehow not lose the pro-lifers, because that would require far too much thought on the voters’ part. Rudy Giuliani, the man known for being the mayor of New York during 9/11, just claimed that the first terrorist attack in the U.S. happened after 2008. Yet people will still love him, and they’ll conveniently forget about all those other attacks, because they already adore him. So before you open your mouth, don’t just think about what you’re going to say, think about how you’re going to say it, and question your position. Be better than Giuliani and Trump.

Validation