I am a 32-year-old professional counselor with a respected reputation in my field and community. When I was a kid,  though not a full-out villain by any means, I had a very nasty attitude at times and if I felt threatened, wronged, or justified in my decision to act out, I made sure it was an epic event (😈); I laugh about it now but the trouble I got in and caused in the 90’s and early 2000’s was not a laughable matter. There are so many stories I could bring up regarding times when I just lost it, stopped caring, and began, as this new generation would  say - “doin’ the most.” I remember teachers threatening me by saying, “Mr. Coleman, that’s it. I’m calling your house tonight.”  The truth is that I surely did not want that to happen because I knew the consequences at home. My mother and father were somewhat jokesters with me and my siblings but we always knew that they were not our friends and we respected their authority. We had a healthy fear of them as well; Mr. and Mrs. Coleman did not ‘play around’. Even though I knew my father was going to whip my a** at some point that night, I chose to press the situation. The combination of the teacher embarrassing me around my peers, me feeling like I had to ‘be cool’ (which meant pretending like I didn’t care about the phone call home), and other variables, I would respond, “I don’t care. Do it.” She kept threatening with more consequences and I kept getting louder and louder saying, “I don’t care.” I would get up purposely disrupting the class, wandering the halls, then later got my a** kicked by my father (lol).

I remember another situation at a family reunion when I did something to upset one of my uncles and he reprimanded me. Again, me ‘not caring’ and being triggered because I was being challenged, I started talking back. He said, “Come here so I can take you to your dad and tell him about your attitude.” Stubborn little 13 year old me says, “Ok, I don’t care.” That situation did not end well either.  At 17 years old, at Mellon basketball court in Pittsburgh, PA, (a place where playing basketball sometimes came second to random fights between hostile males 16-45 years of age) I was playing very aggressive defense against a man who chronically bullied people. He did not like my aggressive defense and I probably was overdoing it because part of me did want to fight him. He was probably in his mid to late 30’s and probably did not care either (lol) because he said, “Eh, if you elbow me like that again I’m knocking you the f*ck out.” I said nothing in return, but in my head, I didn’t care what he said. I was one of those ‘well prove it to me then’ kids. My defense stayed aggressive and I must have elbowed him again because he picked me up and threw me on the fence and cocked his hand back like he was about to swing. Even in my teenage years I  could beat up kids my age and grown men. With this guys above average man strength, size, and agility, I didn’t have a chance. God must have entered his body (lol) because as soon as he cocked his hand back, he immediately stopped, laughed and said, “You know what... naw, I’m not going to do this to you kid.” Two of my older friends who were there with me stood in the background, one of them inching forward with his fist balled ready to swing on the guy if he had swung on me. The guy walked away with his friends, we got our stuff and left, and the situation was left alone. Who knows what could have transpired from that situation. Lives could have been lost...all because we did not care [about any consequences]. At least the older man had some sort of reasoning because he stopped himself from swinging on me. I was the one who really escalated that situation because ‘I did not care’. My father would tell me from time to time, ‘You better leave that n***a mentality in the streets. We’re Coleman’s. We don’t act like that’. The problem, and my main point within this section of the blog, is that the 90’s brought such a strong influence in the sense that being cool or tough was to be apathetic to others (including women), cruel, and willing to go to whatever extreme you had to prove you were not “weak.” It was classic toxic masculinity and this is a cultural paradigm that is STILL bread today. Even though I came from a solid household with structure, love, and support, that toxic energy penetrated the walls and barriers that my parents had created. For a period of my life there were times when I offered myself to a mentality that did not benefit me or those around me. But you know what?? I didn’t care. I cared about being loyal to an unhealthy mentality and certain negative peers that did not have my best interest at heart.

There will always be people who have an apathetic, uncaring mindset about many things in their lives, but the problem comes in that vicious apathy develops into a respected ‘way of life’ for large groups of people (especially kids). Continuing to spend much of my career researching, reading, and figuring out ways to challenge the I don’t care attitude, I have had some epic successes in working with youth and adults who have sometimes suffered from the potentially deadly “I don’t care disease”. I call it a deadly disease because it can be. Some of you may remember Crazy K, the character from the 1995 film Tales from the Hood. Crazy K was a demon in the community, having murdered many of his enemies and some innocent bystanders (including a little girl). There was a scene in the movie where Crazy K was strapped to a chair in what appears to be a psychiatric ward. Another character, Dr. Cushing was orchestrating this environment and she presented Crazy K with hologram images of all the people he murdered. She gives him a “shot at redemption,” if he agrees to “break the chain” that’s plagued his community with so much violence. His response, WITHOUT HESITATION, is, “I don’t give a f*ck about none of these stupid motha’ f*ckas!”  When he realizes that the straps are not anchored down, he gets up and holds one of the psychiatric nurse’s hostage. Dr. Cushing pleads with him to stop, but he continues aggressively chanting over and over, “I don’t give a f*ck! I don’t give a f*ck!” The brilliant part of this scene happens next when the movie watcher realizes that the entire previous scene in the ‘psych’-ward was all happening in Crazy K’s ‘mind’ as he lay on the ground bloody gaining consciousness (probably from having been beaten) still saying - as he wakes up with guns pointed at him by a group of men, “I don’t give a f*ck...I don’t give a f*ck.” One of the men holding a gun says, “WE DON’T GIVE A F*CK EITHER,” as they  riddle his body with bullets. Since the 90’s and maybe even before then, Crazy K’s have been showing up all around the world in all shapes, shades, forms, and sizes. Not caring...and not giving a f*ck - causing unimaginable havoc and terror in the world. As I explore in one of my other blogs, Black America: “I love the 90’s sociopath.”, for some sick reason, there are people who gladly embrace the Crazy K mentality and glorify these individuals as icons for their psychopathic behavior.

I do believe that a certain amount of apathy and/or what I call empathetic apathy is necessary at times but when a person makes a lifestyle out of complete apathy, problems and violence can arise.

Who knows?...maybe I’m the “crazy” one. Maybe this stuff I’ve written about is nonsense. Or...maybe YOU don’t care about any of it because deep down inside there’s a Crazy K somewhere in you.

Do you care??

© Shawn Coleman, MS PC PerspectVe LLC February 22, 2018