By Deke
I saw some news footage of violent anti-government demonstrations in Peru — Molotov cocktails, fires in the streets, tear gas drifting like spicy fog. My first thought (darkly flippant) wasn’t about the suffering or the politics. It was, “How will this affect my blueberry supply in Thailand?”
That’s globalization in a nutshell: we’ve built a world so interconnected that a protest ten thousand miles away makes me worry about smoothie ingredients. It’s absurd, but it’s also true. In that space between one-click shopping and a thousand-click news cycle, empathy sometimes gets lost.
My second thought wasn’t any more noble — just a little more cynical. It was, “DHS is going to use this footage and tell people it’s San Francisco.”
And honestly, I wasn’t joking. We live in an age where anything chaotic or burning is fair game for propaganda. A photo of a Peruvian protest could be repurposed overnight to “prove” the decline of some American city. Half the internet would believe it, repost it, and swear they “remember that corner.”
That’s the tragedy of the modern attention span. The world’s on fire, and our minds are scrolling. We’re all just trying to sort out what’s real and what’s edible — refreshing the feed and checking the fridge.
Maybe the lesson here is that the next global crisis — and there’s always another one coming — won’t just hit our supply chains. It’ll hit our sense of reality. And when it does, we’ll all be standing there like I was, watching the smoke rise and wondering if we should stock up on blueberries before the next truth shortage.
But, that’s just my opinion on, um… blueberries. man. Antioxidants are important.
