Gas Guzzler

I think something like this was among the ideas that I toyed with while developing my previous cartoon on the topic. I don’t recall exactly why I rejected it then, but this version is definitely more streamlined than any approach I considered before.

Another thing that’s changed since then is that a global pandemic has come to America—and this one doesn’t “just” affect gay men, minorities, and the poor/overweight—no, this time even “people who actually matter” are at risk!

I’ve said for years that profit motives do not belong in any industry that concerns itself largely with matters of life and death. To my mind, that describes two at a bare minimum: healthcare, and warfare.

The reasoning behind my thinking is that this eventually puts human life in direct conflict with maximizing profits, and unfortunately, very few people who are sociopathic enough to get to the top of their respective industries in the first place also possess any sense of empathy that would prevent them from allowing, aiding, or even causing mass-death and suffering in order to satisfy their own bottom lines and personal or social goals.

Hell, people will even put their own long-term safety and survival on the line in exchange for petty, short-term gains, to say nothing of others’!

As Arrested Development once shrewdly illustrated in its original series finale, great evil is not something that someone just does all of a sudden out of nowhere: nobody wakes up one day and thinks, “Y’know… I feel like going from zero to genocide today!”

Instead, it usually happens by a matter of degrees: an individual, community or society selling out their scruples little by little, always citing the previous instance of selling-out as sunk-cost justification for the next in pursuit of a Zeno’s paradox-type endpoint, enhanced with the personal incentive of skimming something off for themselves along the way:

“Sure, if I do this, a very narrow range of people might die, but it will enable me to help a much, much wider range of people not die later on! I’m willing to bear any potential guilt for the greater good—besides, then I’ll also be able to afford that COOL BOAT!!”

*forgets to do anything for the wider range of people later, buys increasingly larger and more opulent boats*

I’m probably being too charitable to evil bastards, here, but I guess that’s the curse of empathy from which they don’t suffer, huh??