Howard Beale's "insane" rant from the film Network (1976):
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
Network didn't predict the future. It reflected the times in which it was made (1970s), which just happens to reflect our current age and will probably reflect how the world is tomorrow as well.
We have lost our capacity to be outraged. Beale's plea for us to "get mad" fell on deaf ears then and would probably fall on deaf ears today. I call it "outrage fatigue." We've become so inured to our own foibles and failings that we don't notice the massive wounds inflicted on us by our supposed leaders. Until we show we care, it will continue.
The $350 billion earmarked for "emergency relief" for states during the 2021 pandemic has not yet been fully spent five years later. Tens of billions of dollars that were appropriated in 2021 for what we were told was a critical emergency remain unspent.
The states "have faced significant revenue shortfalls as a result of the economic fallout from the crisis," then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May 2021. "As a result, these governments have endured unprecedented strains, forcing many to make untenable choices between laying off educators, firefighters, and other frontline workers or failing to provide services that communities rely on."
A few days after Yellen's whoppers, Biden added his lies to the pile.
"Spend this money now that you have. Use these funds we've made available to you to prioritize public safety," he said. "Taking action today is going to save lives tomorrow."
Here's the reality.
More than four years after the American Rescue Plan passed (and more than two years after Biden declared the pandemic emergency over), state and local governments were still sitting on billions of dollars from that emergency bailout. A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that, by March 2025, states had spent just $156 billion of the $195.8 billion they received via the American Rescue Plan. Meanwhile, local governments had spent about $102 billion of the $127.8 billion they had been awarded.
Six states—New Jersey, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia—had reported spending less than half of their allocations by March 2025, the GAO reports.
That's $65 billion of unspent funds five years after a supposed "emergency" required that massive expenditure that we were told the states desperately needed to prevent job losses and other horrors from the pandemic.
“Even the unstated assumption behind these handouts — that Washington should step in if there are dips in state revenue — is badly flawed,” wrote David Ditch and Richard Stern, policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation. “Many states are fiscally mismanaged, and federal bailouts enable them to avoid much-needed discipline.”
Over the last few years, I've highlighted some of the more outrageous line items that states spent the "emergency" COVID relief money on, including golf course improvements, hotel and motel upgrades at tourist resorts, and other frivolous expenditures.
"One Rhode Island city spent $53,000 of its American Rescue Fund allocation on new 'ergonomic chairs in the city council chambers,'" WPRI.com reported.
I know that $65 billion doesn't seem like a lot when compared to a $7.4 trillion budget. But when do we start to care enough to get mad at that kind of waste? Is there a breaking point where our "outrage fatigue" vanishes and our anger takes over?
If we have no breaking point, then we may as well throw in the towel and bury our faces in our smartphones to keep the real world out and beg the government to leave us alone with our toasters, TVs, and "steel-belted radials."
