"I only know so much about your world. From where I'm looking, I see that you ponies have it made. You're thoughtful... considerate of one another... communal and altruistic and sharing. Maybe—perhaps—things weren't always sunshine and rainbows for Equestria. But you've obviously put a lot of that behind you. It... it's very easy to do good things here. That cannot be denied... because you're all just so receptive to goodness... to neighborly acts of kindness and stuff. It's like adding warmth to warmth... the toastiness gets magnified... the smiles increase. Real heavenly awesomeness. I dig it.
"Back home? Mmmmmm... not so much. You do something good—super good—and people will either look at you strange or take advantage of it. I mean... sure... people become heroes and nice individuals are honored for their positive legacies and stuff. But that's usually either a footnote in the textbook for fifteen seconds of distraction on Twitter before you get into the real meat of living: misery and conflict in all of its juiciness. Anger, contention, conflict—it's in our blood. Human blood, I mean. Sure, things were worse for civilization once... but that's like comparing a mountain of garbage to a hill of trash. It all still smells. Things are always bad somewhere... someplace... and it's only getting smellier.
"We constantly say positive and optimistic and well-meaning things to one another... but that's only when we can afford it. When the room's been filtered so that it only houses the people who don't want to kill each other. When we're all colored the same... or dressed the same... or voting the same. If you take an actual random scoop of the population, shake it all up in a jar, and let it sit... there won't be much of anything left within a damn hour. I can promise you that. Not unless the glass breaks, and then we'll just be pointing fingers at each other and denying any responsbility for ruining jar in the first place.
"I live in a jar that's been resting on the top shelf for generations... but that's only because of sheer luck, an abundance of resources, and our joining bloody conflicts at the very last second or when it has appeared safest for our own precious hides. Yes, we've had courageous and heroic souls who won us an ounce of our freedom, but we also had to murder a whole lot of people to get us to where we are now. So what if not all of them were 'innocent?' Murder is still murder. A word means a whole lot more or a whole lot less once you realize that the victors of history hold the dictionary. Today, we like to praise our peace-keepers and make national holidays after champions of civil rights and suffrage, but our society was built on slavery and genocide and—from the look of things—we're still profiting from the same old shit; we just write different words for it in our rusty ol' dictionary, and tomorrow there'll be new words for even newer atrocities that we've yet to imagine, but in our hearts we've already condoned them for the ease they'll afford a strategic few of us.
"And while we rest easy on high, we wage little wars—wars that we feel confident in winning from the bunkers of anonymity and heartlessness, pretending to care about things that only matter to those who can actually eat and shit comfortably with ample showers in between. Meanwhile, in the furthest parts of the globe—or even right across the railroad tracks—there are people stuck so friggin' deep in poverty and destitution that they spend all their days worrying about whether or not they can feed themselves or if their infants can live through the winter or if they can walk to school without being bombed, raped, or both. What would they know or care about re-blogs, gas mileage, BOGO sales at Wal-Mart or Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriend or the fine art of cussin' out the cable repairman until he can make the magical box in your living room spit out Game of Thrones on time?
"There're just... too many horrible things in the world to be appalled at. In one part of the globe, you've got married couples being refused a wedding cake on account of their genitalia. And, like, that sucks ass... but then you've also got genocidal ethnic purging going on at the same time in South Asia... or women being mutilated in Africa on account of their religion...or thousands of poor farmers being relocated to make room for a dam or an Olympic park or a highway. And when you live in this world—what do you choose to be shocked at the most? No single person is any more or less worth caring for than the other, so do you pick tackling the smaller injustice because it's right in front of you? Or the huge massacre because it's so easy to identify? Or maybe you just... choose to ignore the really big and horrible things because they're so damn hard to fix without risking a conflict that would wipe out far more people than could live long enough to witness the result of such an intervention? I mean... when did ethics become a matter of affordability over righteousness?
"And it's not like there arent people who want to make things right. People will protest in favor of the married couples who are being mistreated and they will use mass communication to raise awareness of genocide and mutilation and they will throw sanctions at countries that mistreat their own populace... but when has that ever mattered in the long run? If only to give us some frivolous, imagined pat on the back while the powers that be continue to shape the world into something unfair, selective, and selfish? People want change, but they're unwilling to change. For the latter to be accomplished, far more blood would have to be shed and bodies would have to be sacrificed to alter the flow of money, politics, and resources down the wide canal of least resistance. And everyone knows this. Which is why so many people only climb halfway... then settle for the sensation of accomplishment but not the real thing. Those who benefit from the toxicity will maintain it, taking advantage of those who think they're accomplishing change, but really aren't.
"And the bulk of us... the true majority of human beings living on a lopsided planet will do what we're most good at... what all of us are truly excelled at, even if we pretend that we're not.
"And that most practiced and refined of human talents is ambivalence."