I have never had a cable television account in my name, and haven't lived in a house that had live TV service in many years. I stopped listening to the news on the radio when the Las Vegas shooting happened, because the sound of gunshots replayed every few minutes was so distressing. I don't read the news online unless there's something specific I want to know more about. I quit Facebook on New Year's Day several years ago. I joined Instagram because I still like feeling connected to my far-flung friends, but would rather see pictures of what they're passionate about than read vitriolic diatribes. But even with Instagram being the only social media platform I'm active on, the current situation has me exhausted and angry and ready to chuck my phone in the river and go live in a hut in the mountains.
Our culture has embraced a sort of moral absolutism on all sides that's making it impossible to talk about issues and try to find practical, workable solutions. Political "transparency" and the 24-hour news cycle mean that legislators either have to hold fast to every polarizing plank of their platform or use increasingly unscrupulous means to cobble together bills that can pass. When everyone insists that they should get 100% of what they want, nobody gets anything worth having.
Social media, with its algorithms that show a user more and more of what they already know and like, creates echo chambers that convince people their opinions are the only right ones, and that anybody who differs in the slightest is wrong and bad and the enemy. Trends go viral without thought, people re-post without investigating, and a giant game of "telephone" can turn a rational idea into a wing-nut conspiracy theory in moments.
I'm guilty of this myself. It has taken a fair bit of willpower to train myself to research issues to the point where I understand them and don't just automatically believe and parrot the voices that confirm what I already felt ought to be true. When I joined Instagram, I made "no reposts" and "no hashtags" part of my online identity as a way to prevent myself from falling back into the habit of amplifying voices without thinking about whether they're right or wrong or damaging or distorted.
So when, in response to yet another POC being killed by LEOs with no justification, my Instagram feed was suddenly flooded with screaming voices and black squares and more absolutism ("if you don't do XYZ you're racist/bigoted/part-of-the-problem")... I'm having difficulty finding reasons to belong to a society that behaves this way. I don't want to be part of a society that includes police brutality. I don't want to be part of a society that includes looters and arsonists. I don't want to be part of a society that can't decide whether to glorify or vilify white cops who stand in solidarity with BLM. I don't want to be part of a society where "hero" and "villian" are the only options. Humans and the situations we get ourselves into are far more complex and nuanced than that.
We are broken. Capitalism is broken, democracy is broken, America is broken, and all anybody wants to do is scream that it's someone else's fault. Where are the solutions? Suggestions are met with hate because they don't fit someone's personal ideal and, thus, must be horrible. We can't make progress without conversation and compromise, and we can't talk about it when everybody's screaming.
Pack up your epithets, shelve your moral indignation, stop thinking more about the optics of your personal political opinions than about the effects of your behavior (yes, you, who posted a black square yesterday without taking a good look at WHY you were doing it), and LISTEN. Observe. THINK. Think about it from the perspective of someone you disagree with, without automatically writing that person off as a racist or a wing-nut or a "lib-tard" or whatever other term you spit at people who don't think like you. People who disagree with you exist, and they vote and hold office and run businesses, and they, like you, believe they're holding the moral high ground, and believe that their opinions are well-reasoned. To dismiss them or try to do an end-run around them is folly; you can't will them out of existence, and you can't change their minds by shouting at them.
If we don't collectively come down off our high horses, the fires that are burning right now will consume us all. We will be victims of our own egos, our own stupidity, our own inflexibility. We will lay waste to our civilization in the name of being "right."
What good is being right if we're all dead?
