![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We all have better things to do
Mar. 13th, 2021 02:12 amFour years ago, there was an eruption of protests in the Bay Area. I wrote about one at the time, threading in my views about social media exploiting such protests for ad revenue, and the bloviating of that recently-elected orange deadbeat in the White House.
Well over seven million people live around the San Francisco Bay, and the place has a reputation as a pressure cooker for radical and "liberal" ideas -- a word I need to put in quotes now, as a warning of how politicized it's become. News of protests here, often with yelling and fighting and smashing of windows, has leapt up the pages of web browsers and search engines and run loops around the planet at various times in the last decade. And while that happens, the view from here on the ground is something else entirely. In Oakland and Berkeley and other urban centers, people taking to the streets with placards and words and then some subset of them getting violent is something that we've been exposed to, or involved in, enough times to develop second and third thoughts about -- as opposed to the first thoughts that people reading occasionally about them from a remote place are prone to have, and then stop with.
In brief summary, the second and third thoughts are like so:
1. When we're out marching, making something heard, we generally do not think about how it plays in news channels a thousand miles away. The optics are not our main concern. As a political moderate, do you find that the broken windows look bad to you, and damage our cause in your eyes? Here's a hot tip: Not everything is about you.
2. The crowd sometimes looks way more unified than it actually is. A big part of the mass-demonstration is the way it conjures a dialogue and interaction within itself. There are uncountable conversations happening in that crowd. Minds are being changed within it as well as without, and some random Youtuber, newscaster, or blogger is guaranteed to only catch and respond to a tiny fragment of that. (And that's what you see.)
3. Way more often than not, coming out in support of a thing means you are out in fresh air among friends, with a big smile on your face, ready to present your ideas to those who are open-minded but not interested in engaging with people who want to argue. You bring a sign but the slogan has a cheeky, humorous spin. You bring a picnic lunch. It's not necessarily about anger and struggle in the moment; it's about safety and inspiration among friends. But you'd never tell that from the churning, silent videos of the masses that make the backdrop of every talking head with an alarming opinion about it online.
But anyway...
I've written before about why these protests become world-wide news, and how little sense that makes. It's just novelty: If you live in a neighborhood where mass gatherings of angry and/or civic-minded people never happen, it's pretty interesting to watch. It's interesting in a way that regular humdrum things - like murder - just aren't. But as your eyeballs devour it, I think it's wise to consider the reason why it's there in the feed for you to click on in the first place, when so many other things aren't -- and what that says about the way your perception of the world is being narrowed, not widened, by that feed.
(As an aside, 88 people were murdered in Oakland last year, and I guarantee you did not hear about any of those murders from the front page of Yahoo or the Apple News app or wherever you get your daily squirt of reward-center hormones.)
Nothing's changed with the way local protests are exploited, and I don't want to repeat myself here. But I'd like to point out what has changed: After the last four years of wallowing in all this outrage and conspiracy, day after day, the entire country - including chunks of our media apparatus - has begun to exhibit a sort of immune response to it.
COVID-19 is the natural and immediate comparison: The pandemic forced our society into a state of fragmentation and suspicion, and to begin re-integrating with each other we needed to first find a vaccine. I sense a similar thing has happened in our collective culture, and we are now so sick of disunity we are deliberately turning away from news and entertainment and celebrities and politicians who court our attention by trying to inspire it. We're sick of fragmentation. We want to come back together. We want it viscerally.
Now, it's still early days for the new American presidency, and even though we clearly elected the most non-controversial, un-threatening, boring old caretaker uncle of a president we could possibly have nominated this time around, and that fact stands as the single biggest piece of evidence for my belief, I could still be wrong about it. Perhaps this flourishing of calls for unity and calm is just a brief lull, in the onslaught of rage and exploitation that social media has choked us with like forest-fire smoke for years now -- a lull caused by the focus of so many people's angst suddenly being silenced, like cutting the head off a screaming Twitter banshee -- and as soon as the collective news media and its various cuckoo-bird imitators find a replacement - perhaps a whole chorus of smaller banshees - we'll all tumble into that smoke again.
But I hope not. Because there's lots of work to do, and it's good work as well. Remember good, uncontroversial work? Wasn't that nice?
Aren't you so done, with giving your attention over to extremists, conspiracies, social shaming, calls to hate and reject, and impotent wailing about the end of the world? So many of us are. At some future point, when you can walk outside and talk in close quarters with new people - which hopefully will be soon for us all - why not keep that hopeful feeling going, by adding to efforts that do good without needing to declare an enemy out-group? There are so many. Conservation efforts, for example. Waste and pollution reduction efforts. Improvements in energy efficiency, changes in our attitude about communal spaces, about material needs... Hoooly crap there is so much better stuff to do than getting upset over what some dingus-of-the-week said on Twitter, no matter how awful it was.
And now, I will leave you with something that you might use for that kind of inspiration, but it comes with a warning: It may inspire you to action, but it will do so by first absolutely breaking your heart. So, don't follow that link unless you're in a place you are ready to rally from.
If you're not, do take care of yourself. And, drop me a note. I'll send you bits of poetry and photos of Mira until you're feeling a bit better.
Well over seven million people live around the San Francisco Bay, and the place has a reputation as a pressure cooker for radical and "liberal" ideas -- a word I need to put in quotes now, as a warning of how politicized it's become. News of protests here, often with yelling and fighting and smashing of windows, has leapt up the pages of web browsers and search engines and run loops around the planet at various times in the last decade. And while that happens, the view from here on the ground is something else entirely. In Oakland and Berkeley and other urban centers, people taking to the streets with placards and words and then some subset of them getting violent is something that we've been exposed to, or involved in, enough times to develop second and third thoughts about -- as opposed to the first thoughts that people reading occasionally about them from a remote place are prone to have, and then stop with.
In brief summary, the second and third thoughts are like so:
1. When we're out marching, making something heard, we generally do not think about how it plays in news channels a thousand miles away. The optics are not our main concern. As a political moderate, do you find that the broken windows look bad to you, and damage our cause in your eyes? Here's a hot tip: Not everything is about you.
2. The crowd sometimes looks way more unified than it actually is. A big part of the mass-demonstration is the way it conjures a dialogue and interaction within itself. There are uncountable conversations happening in that crowd. Minds are being changed within it as well as without, and some random Youtuber, newscaster, or blogger is guaranteed to only catch and respond to a tiny fragment of that. (And that's what you see.)
3. Way more often than not, coming out in support of a thing means you are out in fresh air among friends, with a big smile on your face, ready to present your ideas to those who are open-minded but not interested in engaging with people who want to argue. You bring a sign but the slogan has a cheeky, humorous spin. You bring a picnic lunch. It's not necessarily about anger and struggle in the moment; it's about safety and inspiration among friends. But you'd never tell that from the churning, silent videos of the masses that make the backdrop of every talking head with an alarming opinion about it online.
But anyway...
I've written before about why these protests become world-wide news, and how little sense that makes. It's just novelty: If you live in a neighborhood where mass gatherings of angry and/or civic-minded people never happen, it's pretty interesting to watch. It's interesting in a way that regular humdrum things - like murder - just aren't. But as your eyeballs devour it, I think it's wise to consider the reason why it's there in the feed for you to click on in the first place, when so many other things aren't -- and what that says about the way your perception of the world is being narrowed, not widened, by that feed.
(As an aside, 88 people were murdered in Oakland last year, and I guarantee you did not hear about any of those murders from the front page of Yahoo or the Apple News app or wherever you get your daily squirt of reward-center hormones.)
Nothing's changed with the way local protests are exploited, and I don't want to repeat myself here. But I'd like to point out what has changed: After the last four years of wallowing in all this outrage and conspiracy, day after day, the entire country - including chunks of our media apparatus - has begun to exhibit a sort of immune response to it.
COVID-19 is the natural and immediate comparison: The pandemic forced our society into a state of fragmentation and suspicion, and to begin re-integrating with each other we needed to first find a vaccine. I sense a similar thing has happened in our collective culture, and we are now so sick of disunity we are deliberately turning away from news and entertainment and celebrities and politicians who court our attention by trying to inspire it. We're sick of fragmentation. We want to come back together. We want it viscerally.
Now, it's still early days for the new American presidency, and even though we clearly elected the most non-controversial, un-threatening, boring old caretaker uncle of a president we could possibly have nominated this time around, and that fact stands as the single biggest piece of evidence for my belief, I could still be wrong about it. Perhaps this flourishing of calls for unity and calm is just a brief lull, in the onslaught of rage and exploitation that social media has choked us with like forest-fire smoke for years now -- a lull caused by the focus of so many people's angst suddenly being silenced, like cutting the head off a screaming Twitter banshee -- and as soon as the collective news media and its various cuckoo-bird imitators find a replacement - perhaps a whole chorus of smaller banshees - we'll all tumble into that smoke again.
But I hope not. Because there's lots of work to do, and it's good work as well. Remember good, uncontroversial work? Wasn't that nice?
Aren't you so done, with giving your attention over to extremists, conspiracies, social shaming, calls to hate and reject, and impotent wailing about the end of the world? So many of us are. At some future point, when you can walk outside and talk in close quarters with new people - which hopefully will be soon for us all - why not keep that hopeful feeling going, by adding to efforts that do good without needing to declare an enemy out-group? There are so many. Conservation efforts, for example. Waste and pollution reduction efforts. Improvements in energy efficiency, changes in our attitude about communal spaces, about material needs... Hoooly crap there is so much better stuff to do than getting upset over what some dingus-of-the-week said on Twitter, no matter how awful it was.
And now, I will leave you with something that you might use for that kind of inspiration, but it comes with a warning: It may inspire you to action, but it will do so by first absolutely breaking your heart. So, don't follow that link unless you're in a place you are ready to rally from.
If you're not, do take care of yourself. And, drop me a note. I'll send you bits of poetry and photos of Mira until you're feeling a bit better.
