"World Consciousness can sometimes be a cover for the most fundamental self-absorption. Take the bird in oil. For starters, it’s delicious. (That’s just a joke, pro-bird, anti-oil types! It’s not the kind of oil that makes a bird delicious. (It might be.)) But that bird, the one on the screen, will drown long before any of us can make it over there to pull it out. And while we sit, sobbing, looking at a picture of a circumstance we can’t change, we’re erecting a monument to our own powerlessness, and that in turn can validate the idea that we have no effect on the real people in our immediate vicinity, and consequently need not try our hardest in the matters that directly concern us."
