benandsteve.com

May 27, 2026

A kitchen memory becomes a reflection on morality, public outrage, and the slow numbing of America’s conscience.

While standing in the kitchen on Wednesday, May 27, making a cherry cobbler the way my grandmother “Mom” used to make it, my mind drifted backward. Funny how certain smells do that. Warm cherries, sugar, butter, and crust baking in an oven can carry a person across decades faster than any airplane ever could.

I thought about my grandparents. Their values. Their generation. My dad and what he stood for. A World War II veteran, he belonged to what many call America’s “Greatest Generation,” but to me he was simply my father — a man who believed there were lines decent people did not cross. Some things were right. Some things were wrong. There was no committee meeting needed to figure it out.

And while stirring cherries in a pan, my thoughts wandered into modern America.

That is a dangerous road sometimes.

I began thinking about the Me Too movement, about Gloria Allred, about Bill Cosby, and about the avalanche of accusations and scandals that dominated television screens and headlines for years. Before anyone misunderstands where I am going, let me make something clear: I supported holding predators accountable. I still do. Anyone who assaults another human being at their most vulnerable moment deserves exposure, punishment, and justice.

But somewhere along the way, another effect quietly settled over the country — one I do not think we fully considered.

The behavior became so common in the headlines that the public slowly became numb to it.

Day after day, week after week, another press conference. Another attorney standing before microphones. Another accusation. Another celebrity. Another politician. Another athlete. Another scandal. Eventually it no longer shocked people the way it once would have. It became background noise in the American living room.

That is not because the acts were less serious.

It was because the public mind can only absorb outrage for so long before exhaustion sets in.

The result, in my opinion, was a strange cultural desensitization. Americans became so overwhelmed by constant scandal that the emotional impact weakened. Something that once would have frozen the nation in disbelief instead became another headline to scroll past while eating dinner.

Then came the now-infamous recording of Donald Trump speaking crudely about women on a tour bus. Years earlier, comments like that might have politically buried a public figure overnight. But by then, America had been swimming in scandal for so long that many people seemed emotionally exhausted by outrage itself. The national sense of shock had dulled.

People heard it, argued over it, and then many simply moved on.

That realization bothered me standing there in the kitchen more than the politics ever did.

Because this is not really about one movement, one lawyer, or one politician. It is about what happens to a society when it is exposed to so much controversy, anger, and moral collapse that it stops reacting altogether. The constant flood does not always sharpen public awareness. Sometimes it numbs it.

My father’s generation feared becoming morally careless. They worried about standards slipping quietly away one compromise at a time. They understood something we often forget today: when everything becomes shocking, eventually nothing is shocking.

And maybe that is the danger we should be talking about.

Not whether wrongdoing should be exposed — it absolutely should.

But whether a culture flooded endlessly with outrage eventually loses its ability to recognize the seriousness of what it is seeing.

Standing there with cherry cobbler baking in the oven, I wondered what my grandparents would think about modern America. I suspect they would be less concerned with politics than with something deeper.

They would ask whether we are still capable of being genuinely disturbed by bad behavior anymore — or whether we have simply become accustomed to it.