Well, it’s not true. I don’t have a petition to stop petitions so the title of my post here is fake news. Why not post some fake news. Everybody else is! Well, that’s not true either, but you get my point.

In any case, I’ve signed many petitions in my day, and I continue to do so, but it’s getting tedious. SumOfUs, Change.org, etc., etc., etc. There’s a petition for everything. Sometimes petitions are aimed at government, sometimes at businesses like Nestlé’s, Monsanto and a thousand others. In my email today there was one about the palm oil business that’s currently raping and pillaging rain forests in Indonesia, destroying orangutan habitat as it goes along. At the end of each email there is always the plea to donate money and share their campaign with others.

The thing is that the vast majority of the causes that come across my email accounts with petition solicitations are really quite worthy although sometimes a little heavy on the hype. I agree with most of them. Still, I’ve started just deleting their emails without even looking at them. I’m feeling a little guilty about that. Partly it’s because I’m not really engaged in the good fight on the streets or in any other way, not anymore at least, so this is one small way to still contribute, I suppose. Oh, I was out there for decades, but fatigue has set in and I’m retired…from active employment and now,  maybe from other things too. I’ve long been an ‘activist’, but I can’t say that my activism has accomplished that much. There’s still no shortage of ‘evil’ in the world. In fact, it may be getting thicker, denser and more widespread than in the seventies although it’s hard to top the evil things that occurred all over the world in the first half of the Twentieth century. There’ll always be things to protest against, I guess. I’m just finding that the saturation of my email account with petition requests is getting a little ‘old’ as they say. So what is an old, tired guy to do, especially one with an autoimmune disease that saps my energy as efficiently as a spider saps the life out of a hapless fly caught in its web. Maybe it’s time for the youngun’s to take the lead. It’s tough though, because I still care. I can always unsubscribe to petition sites, but then I really feel like I’ve completely withdrawn from the social world. I know, it’s not rational, but it’s the way I’m feeling these days.