We are a society that is addicted to outrage. I don&#x27;t begrudge people being outraged at things, but it&#x27;s not a terribly helpful position and it does tend to amplify the exposure of the thing that is outraged over far beyond what it deserves to receive.<p>For example, this stupid Starbucks &quot;Red Cups&quot; issue. It&#x27;s probably just a handful of idiots who don&#x27;t even understand their own ideology who are complaining about these cups. And I personally would never have known about the whole issue if it weren&#x27;t for people in my Twitter stream complaining about people complaining about red cups. How many of those people who are now complaining about the cups learned about the issue from people they know who complained about people complaining about the cups?<p>It&#x27;s like some kind of hamfisted, Saturday morning special on intolerance or something, like one of those old Star Trek episodes where some people had half of their face black and other people had half of their face white, or vise versa.<p>We&#x27;ve socialized ourselves into believing that we must social-media-comment on every issue to make sure everyone knows where we stand, to create proof that we still maintain our standing within our in-crowds. It&#x27;s exactly like school-children jumping in to mob bully someone. We have a child&#x27;s understanding of how interpersonal relationships work. We can&#x27;t broker any level of disagreement, because that would call into question whether or not we&#x27;re BFFs.<p>It&#x27;s nothing new. Remember people tying yellow ribbons around their trees during Desert Storm? Same thing. It&#x27;s easier to retweet than it is to accept that you can&#x27;t do anything about an issue.