One is tempted to file the entire affair under “Late Capitalist Psychodrama” and be done with it, but that would be too merciful. What transpired last week at a franchised sugar bunker in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, was nothing less than a perfect, glittering miniature of the age: two parties, each armed with nothing more lethal than a smartphone and a grievance, managed to detonate a thermonuclear culture war over whether an extra ribbon of caramel costs ninety-nine cents or is, in fact, a universal human right.
The facts, stripped of the tribal war-paint, are almost insultingly trivial. A Somali couple, one of them veiled, requested the customary bonus squirt. The employee, a forty-three-year-old local named Crystal Wilsey, declined to dispense it gratis. Voices were raised. Someone invoked modesty, someone else invoked witchcraft, and within ninety seconds the counter girl was shouting racial epithets while the customers recorded the whole thing for posterity and profit. By nightfall she was unemployed, by morning she was a martyr with a six-figure crowdfunding haul, and by the weekend the internet had divided itself, once again, into the precise 50–50 split it achieves whenever a camera and a pulse are present.
Let's start by eliminating the sanctimonious theater. It's the type of fairy tale that only the most gullible people would believe—that the employee's words suddenly sprung from the primordial racist ooze. If one wishes to defend racism as an ongoing necessity, the employee's language was terrible, but it was justified in the short term, leading to the desire to offend for the sake of offending. Equally risible is the claim that the couple drifted into the mall that afternoon radiating nothing but beatific tolerance, only to be assaulted by spontaneous white supremacy. Both sides arrived pre-loaded with contempt; the only variable was whose detonator clicked first.
"The internet had divided itself, once again, into the precise 50–50 split it achieves whenever a camera and a pulse are present."
What neither side possessed, evidently, was the one virtue that has kept human society from devouring itself since the first caveman refused to share his mammoth fat: the capacity to mind one’s own bloody business. A transaction that should have concluded in twelve seconds with either a dollar changing hands or a quiet retreat instead became a referendum on immigration, modesty, entitlement, and the precise market value of corn-syrup derivative. Ninety-nine cents. Less than the price of a postage stamp. Less than the coins you would kick aside on the sidewalk rather than stoop. For this, careers are ruined, strangers send death threats, and grown adults type manifestos about witchcraft bandanas.
One need not apportion blame with Solomonic exactitude to see the larger pattern. The Trayvon Martin tragedy, the Covington blood libel, the endless parade of Starbucks and Uber and airline-seat recliner scandals; each is merely a new stage on which the same play is performed. Someone refuses to let the small thing remain small. Someone else refuses to walk away. A camera appears. And suddenly the entire republic is expected to choose between Saint and Monster over an incident that, in a healthier age, would have been forgotten before the caramel cooled.
There is, in the end, only one commandment worth observing in these situations, and it is not “stand your ground” or “record everything” or “amplify the oppressed.” It is the blunt, graceless, eternally unpopular injunction: mind your own fucking business. Pay the ninety-nine cents or don’t. Dispense the drizzle or don’t. Walk away, swallow the insult, live to fight another day over something that actually matters. The alternative is what we have now: a civilization that has mistaken every petty irritation for the Battle of Thermopylae and every smartphone for the burning bush.
Until we relearn the ancient art of strategic indifference, the Cinnabon counter will remain what it has always secretly been: the front line in a war nobody can win, fought with weapons nobody should ever use, over stakes too small to see without an electron microscope.
"Ninety-nine cents. Good God."
