I'm not exactly sure what part of this surprises you, especially for anyone who's been here longer than a few years.

I had a captain argue with me because I had mentioned some furloughed pilots (we had nearly 800+ furloughed at the time). He said we didn't have anyone on furlough and I was full of $4!t (which I am, but wasn't on this particular topic). We went round and round for about 15 minutes, but his final argument was that he hadn't heard about it and his buddy in the chief pilots office would have told him. I ran into him a few weeks later, and he comes up and says "you know what? You were right!", like that made my life complete or something.

Point is, a lot of pilots view this job through a very narrow lens. Unless it impacts them directly, they don't know, and don't want to know. ALPA updates get tossed and company memos ignored until CQ. I wish my personality and/or the industry in general let me tiptoe through life like that, but they're not.