Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic retells the classic fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." A boy repeatedly tells townspeople there is a wolf when there is none, and they come running each time. Eventually, when a real wolf appears, nobody comes to help because they have learned to distrust the boy's warnings.

The final panel shifts to a political context: a president asks an advisor "Why don't people care about the new crisis?!" and the advisor responds, "Let's face it, Mister President: the citizens are lazy." The satire here is pointed -- the comic suggests that when governments or leaders repeatedly raise false alarms or exaggerate threats, public apathy to genuine crises is the predictable result, yet those in power blame the public for being "lazy" rather than acknowledging their own role in eroding trust. It is a commentary on the boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic in politics, where leaders who overhype threats eventually find the public tuned out when a real crisis arrives.