In early March, as the COVID situation was heating up, and three years of the Trump administration had me against the ropes of despair, I took what I thought would be a brief hiatus from Facebook. The world had become so loud I could no longer hear my own primal screaming over the din of everyone else’s. 8 months later, I’m still on my brief hiatus.
Life without daily Facebook is certainly quieter. I miss the daily interaction I had with so many people, my carefully curated kindred spirits. My feelings of loss over their day to day presence in my life is real, but what is also real is the space that’s opened up in my heart and mind that once held my online life.
I’d like to say that I have done amazing things in this period, defined by completing some great work of art or finally organizing all the things or learning a new language or becoming a yoga master or… Really what I have done is I have survived. I’ve done a lot of crossword puzzles. I learned how to make bagels. I ate a lot of bagels. I made recipes I’ve always meant to try. I gained weight, and frankly I enjoyed the process of gaining weight, if not the result.
I’ve dealt with health issues. More health issues than is strictly fair if I’ll be honest. There are several perfectly healthy people out there who ought to be sending me gift cards for carrying their share of fucked up health issues. I also decided this was as good a time as any to start a deep dive in therapy to unravel some of the knots I’ve tied myself into for years.
And in the midst of all this, I thought. I thought a lot about The World and How It Is Now. I’ve thought that maybe I could or should Write Something that expresses what I feel about The Now. I wrestled with my personal demons that tell me if my writing isn’t amazing and earth shaking, destined to take the world by storm, heal the sick, mend racial division and feed the world, it’s not worth doing. Perfectionism is a cunt.
I’ve spent so much time being angry. I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry. It was one of my big reasons for taking leave of social media. My Facebook time had become an obsessive quest to deliver the perfect scathing retort. Cleverly packaged rage was my great white whale. As an information professional, I know the forces at work to push our buttons and make us all enraged and shouting at each other all the time. I knew that I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything meaningful. I knew I wasn’t contributing to making the world better. It’s cheesy but I do think we ought to at least try to make the world slightly better than we found it.
Leaving Facebook did not make me less angry. I don’t want to mislead anyone. In one of my recurring stress dreams I have something really important to say but have lost my voice. I open my mouth to scream and nothing comes out. The last three years have been this dream made real. Rage whips the words from my mouth before they’re uttered. I’m angry. I’m devastated. I’m so disappointed. I’m not original in these feelings, and I have nothing profound to say about them.
About a year ago (I think, or maybe two, time has started unraveling lately) I was part of a profound and meaningful program with the Center for Digital Civic Culture, part of the USC Center for Religious and Civic Culture. The focus of the program is learning how to develop meaningful, productive online spaces that promote open, honest communication about difficult topics. (There’s a lot to it that can’t be summarized easily but I encourage you to check it out here if you’re curious: https://crcc.usc.edu/dcc/principles/ )
The program appealed to me for a number of reasons. As an information professional, part of my job is knowing how to identify legitimate information vs misleading or manipulative content. As a human on this earth, I believe the only way through this waking nightmare is for people of good will with different perspectives to come together and find a way to work it out respectfully. This, to me, is the promise and the burden of democracy.
Democracy doesn’t exist without different opinions. Democracy doesn’t exist without disagreement. Democracy is pointless without a tolerance for heated debate. People care about things, and democracy should offer a platform for people to articulate why they feel the way they do, and why they believe something is important.
The IDCC course was amazing and I learned a great deal. When it was over, however, I realized that I still did not have an answer to the question that has been haunting me for the last 3 years. What does it mean to work towards bipartisanship in dangerous times? How do you reach across the aisle when it feels as if the other side is trying to annihilate everything you hold dear?
Time hasn’t made this any clearer to me, although it’s allowed me flashes of clarity. I think it’s a real problem that out two primary political parties do not represent our complexities as Americans. Our parties have become meaningless baskets labeled liberal and conservative that we dump things in that have very little to do with whether you believe in a fiscally liberal or conservative economic theories. We all know this is true, but we forget it with shocking ease. You can be a social conservative who thinks reproductive decisions should be safe and legal. You can be a Black American who likes cops and conservative fiscal theory. You can be a gay racist. You can be a feminist gun enthusiast. You can be socially liberal who thinks all taxes are theft. You can be an evangelical environmentalist. This is America and you can be any damn thing, but our two baskets have become too frayed to hold us all.
Now these baskets aren’t just not holding us comfortably, they’re condemning us, removing our ability to find any common ground because it feels too threatening. I’m a lifelong Democrat who is not an angry socialist who wants to steal your guns, kill some cops, murder birds with windmills and pedophile your children. Frankly, I’m profoundly offended you would think so. What the hell is wrong with you? Conversely, I believe that there are lifelong Republicans who are not white supremacist fascists who want to kill black people for sport, strip women and LGBTQIA people of their rights, destroy our environment, schools and communities and sell the remnants to the highest corporate bidder. But we live in an environment of spin, talking heads, news, memes and social media that work overtime to convince us that these are our only choices.
Social media has revealed to us what was always true, but we just didn’t mention it. We all have things at our core that are varying levels of importance to us, but we don’t disclose them all at every chance meeting. Before social media, your feelings on immigration didn’t come up at book group. Revealing your stand on reproductive rights wasn’t a requirement to join the community choir. This allowed us all a certain level of grace. It created spaces where people could work together on shared interests without demanding that we share every single interest. But now we know and we don’t know how to put Pandora back in the box.
The election is tomorrow, and I only know one thing for certain. Tomorrow we will all still be here, together. We will still live in this country together. We will still have strong feelings about what our country is and should be that we have to figure out together. This isn’t some Pollyanna, pie in the sky wish, but a reality check. As a nation, we are Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier handcuffed to each other in The Defiant Ones. We are trapped in here together.
There’s so much about this country that isn’t working for so many people, and the only way to fix that shit is together. It suuuuucks. A friend once said to me that there is absolutely nothing worse than democracy, except for all the other forms of government. I absolutely believe there are people from all walks of life and all perspectives who love America more than they hate people who don’t agree with them. That’s the only thing that gives me the least bit of hope.
All I am is American. I’ve lived in six different states in my life, and there’s a part of me is each of them, but mostly what I am is American. I don’t know what else to be. I love this wonderful, broken, hopeful, fucked up place. I started to write this because I hoped it would lead me to some flash of insight, but still, I have no solutions. I accept that things are going to continue to be hard for a while, perhaps even get worse. I know there’s no way to stop this national temper tantrum without hard work from all of us. I know that almost every single person that I know personally, regardless of their political affiliations, are good people who are just trying to get by, help out others when they can, live a meaningful life.
Tomorrow at work I’m going to be helping people who may have lost their ballots or somehow failed to register to vote. The library works with the county auditor’s office as what they call a Voter Point of Assistance, allowing us to provide some of the services for which people would otherwise have to go to the auditor’s office. We expect it will be very busy. We’re expecting traffic flow problems in the parking lot. We’ve been coached on how to respond to armed protestors. (Washington is an open carry state, so how we deal is we don’t do anything.) I don’t know how its going to go. I’m reasonably certain I won’t enjoy it. But I know that at the end of the day, I will have done my part for democracy. I hope it’s enough.
Random Knowledge Syndrome 
As fabulous as your fur child. Always interesting. Always a good read. And most of all, something that makes us think.
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