Here is what The Dress, as depicted across the Internet, looks like:

The visual/moral/existential discrepancies—ceci n’est pas une robe—are most likely traceable to the play of light on the pigment rhodopsin, found in the rods of the human eye, and also to the glorious dynamism of the human sensory experience, though maybe also to a hoax of Santa and/or Söze proportions, and possibly also to a rupture in the space-time continuum that can be mended only by Matthew McConaughey's dimples. Regardless. The Rorschach dress—the dress that, as so many news outlets have reminded us, has "broken the Internet"—has brought us together; it has divided us; it has caused us to question the physical world and our place within it and hinted that perception is relative and also that while facts may be sacred they are also uncomfortably unsteady. Maybe the left shark was actually yellow, and what is yellow anyway, I mean like how would you describe yellow to a blind person, and have you ever really looked at your hand, like really looked, and HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE WHAT I SEE and maybe The Matrix was onto something and I AM SORRY BUT IT IS SO OBVIOUSLY WHITE AND GOLD and either way we will all die alone.

So, yeah. You can read the dress—sorry, #thedress—as a metaphor: for our knee-jerk impulse toward partisanship (#TEAMBLUEANDBLACK), for the dynamic nature of observable reality (#TEAMWHITEANDGOLD), for the Internet’s ability to prove Walt Whitman right yet again, for its ability to prove Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrong yet again, for the fundamental challenge of consensus-building in American democracy, for Plato’s caves and Russell’s turtles and Bill Murray’s groundhog. What I want to focus on, though, is a little sliver of all that: a particular strain of commentary that arose during the explosion of conversation about #thedress. Here is a representative tweet, from God (well, @TheTweetofGod) himself:

The color of a dress? Really? That's what you're asking Me? THE OCEAN LEVELS ROSE FOUR INCHES IN TWO YEARS. You know that, right? — God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 27, 2015

This is a line of logic that will be familiar from most any Meme Event—the logic that says, basically, "don’t look at that; that is unimportant." It’s attention-policing, and it’s reminiscent of so many other strains of rhetorical legislation that play out in online conversations: You can’t say that. You can’t talk about that. GUYS, the attention-policer usually begins. How can you be talking about a dress/a leg/a pair of llamas/a dancing neoprene shark when climate change/net neutrality/marriage equality/ISIS/China/North Korea is going on?

The world, to be sure, is a complicated and often tragic and often deeply unfair place. It contains famines and genocides and war, births and deaths, Katy Perry and Björk, Big Macs and kale and Bloomin' Onions, privilege and the lack of it, llamas that are caged and llamas that are free. And we humans—animals who are striving to be so much more—have a big say in the balance between the good and the bad. We should not be glib about any of that. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that, if you find yourself with the ability to use the most transformational communications platform the world has ever known to engage in debates about the color of a dress being sold on Amazon dot com, you are, fundamentally, extremely privileged. And thus in a better position than most to make the world better. Attention is a valuable thing; we have an obligation to be selective about where we direct it.