How Social Media Became the New Tobacco, The Promise We Broke, & When Public Health Goes Quiet
March 28, 2026
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: The quiet machinery of harm.
Social Media Verdict: It’s fair. And addresses the damage we chose not to see.
Video Break: What else? March Madness!
Promises Made, Promises Unke(m)pt: What our allies are learning to expect.
The Spotted Secret: An outbreak Florida didn’t want you to know about.
What I’m Watching: The Battle of Algiers
Jukebox Playlist: Redemption Song
Kareem’s Daily Quote
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” — Paraphrase of a quote by Hannah Arendt
It’s one of those quotes that lands differently every time you read it, and depending on the world in which you happen to be living. Arendt wasn’t talking about cartoon villains or people twirling mustaches in dark rooms. She was talking about the far more common kind of harm, carried out by people who simply don’t decide. Who comply and look away. Who follow the script handed to them, even when the script leads somewhere no one should go. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt coined another phrase we have the sad reality of repeating often: “the banality of evil.”
And if I’m honest, that quiet kind of evil, the kind that makes almost no waves and calls almost no attention to itself, is the kind that worries me the most.
We tend to imagine wrongdoing as something fueled by malice, but more often its only fuel is inertia. By people who don’t stop to ask, What am I participating in? Who is this hurting? What responsibility do I have here?
I’ve seen versions of this throughout my life. The pattern is always the same: a system starts to wobble, the warning signs appear, and the people in charge convince themselves that silence is safer than action. That staying the course is easier than steering it. That harm is something happening “out there,” not something they’re enabling every day that they choose not to act.
And the consequences rarely fall on the people who could help but don’t. They fall on those who trusted them. Who put them in power and positions of authority. Eventually, it’s the people with the least power—the ordinary folk—who won’t have the luxury of looking away. It hurts the very ones who can’t afford to wait for institutions to find their moral compass, because it’s their pocketbooks that go bare; it’s their children who go to fight in a questionable war; it’s their once-buzzing factories and places of business that go silent with a lack of work and resources; their gutted towns that blow away with the wind.
Arendt understood that most harm comes not from intention but from the absence of intention. From the shrug and the “it’s not my job.” From the desire to keep your head down so it won’t be chopped off.
But here’s the other side of that truth, the hopeful side. If indecision can cause harm, then clarity can prevent it. If silence enables damage, then speaking up interrupts it. If looking the other way allows systems to fail the very people they’re supposed to protect, then choosing to act becomes a form of resistance.
The road toward justice is slow. It’s unglamorous. It’s full of a variety of people who usually have only one thing in common: they’ve decided, in small ways and large ones, that they won’t be part of the machinery that hurts others.
We’re living in a moment when that choice matters more than ever. So the question Arendt leaves us with is simple, though rarely easy: Do we decide who we are, or do we let the world decide for us?
