The death of Nelson Mandela didn't move me at all. I just didn't care.

The day after I found out Nelson Mandela was dead, I went out for breakfast. Life goes on, right?

Breakfast is my favorite meal and my favorite meal to eat in a restaurant. The night before I went out for breakfast, I thought lovingly of what I might order. French toast. Ham and eggs. Pancakes and bacon.

I went with the ham and eggs, two over easy, hash browns, toast made with that cheap, clammy white bread that makes the best toast. Hot sauce on the eggs, shake of pepper on the hash browns.

Mandela was a secular saint, one of those people whose noble acts caused the world's notoriety machine to suck the humanity out of his blood until he was a plaster statue, "Nelson of Freedom," like "I-Have-A-Dream Martin" and "Gone-Too-Soon JFK."

They're not people by the time we get done with them, just pictures on postage stamps, impossible one-virtue non-human beings. We turn our eyes from their marital infidelities, angers, weaknesses, blind spots, all frailties.

And I pay the electric bill, worry if my 12-year-old truck will make another winter, take care of my elderly mother and, on certain blessed days, I get to eat breakfast in a diner.

Did Mandela die too far from me? Did he "free" everyone but me? Is it, in 21st-century American non-speech, because he was black?

Or do I, as less than a footnote to history, live so far down in that anonymous subsoil of humanity that great men stride the earth above me as great events make high-up sonic booms I cannot hear?

I know people who feel about Sarah Palin the way drooling fake-grief-stricken news anchors sounded like they felt about Mandela. I know people who can talk about the right to own a gun in the same way Maya Angelou writes poetry, which is to say badly but striving for the profound.

People have defended Ted Cruz to me in tones that would have suited the birth of a messiah or the death of a parent.

It's getting hard to tell the real grief from the expected grief, the homegrown outrage from the stuff they make in Chinese factories, the real call to action from the CEO's sneer that you're lucky to have a job, ya monkey.

The fire bell rings and rings and no one comes. We are numb with disaster, serving for nothing in Afghanistan, lined up at the food pantry in Ohio, fighting, black and white, for the last bits of jobs.

The apartheid fence is going up in America, rich on one side, poor on the other. Welcome to shantytown.

And we have no hero, no voice bidding us resist, just a hundred thousand voices oozing fake outrage over the political gaffe of the moment.

It's why I couldn't grieve for Nelson Mandela.

I'm bitter because no one will do for me what he did for his people.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com Marc Munroe Dion's books Between Wealth and Welfare and Mill River Smoke are available at Amazon.com.