Social Media, You Monster.
Social Media You Monster
The irony about this post is that I'm going to hustle it out to social media the best I can. It will get me like 10 visitors. [Everybody cheers] But let's hate on social media a little bit. Because right now I hate it. But it's also the norm. So I'm also fighting that, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" feeling pretty hard. And I'm losing. Because... well, because Instagram is too damn pretty and Snapchat makes my face look funny and Facebook has all the baby pictures. But I believe social media is the chink in our armor as a society. I think it's teaching us that our opinions are allowed to be one-sided. We're allowed to throw verbal garbage at a proverbial (digital) wall and assume that our opinion is the only one that matters—because even when Facebook DOESN'T hide it from those who wouldn't immediately check that little blue thumb to agree with us—we get to ignore the voices we don't like. We get to hide them, delete them, pretend they don't exist. And then we end up with this election.
I want to be clear from the get: I am NOT going to talk about either one of the candidates here.
This commentary has NOTHING to do with WHO we elected and EVERYTHING to do with WHO WE ARE.
My takeaway from this entire 2016 run for the White House is that nobody, on either side at this point, feels heard or respected or important. This entire race oozed feelings of disenfranchisement on both sides. It was always "us" against "them." The "we" always feeling so much smaller, and yet so much loftier, than the "they." You only feel that much "better than" other people when you lack exposure to them—or when you're confused about what's really driving them. It's impossible to have empathy for a community you've never met, seen, or experienced. We've forgotten how to listen to each other's needs. Most importantly, we've forgotten that ALL NEEDS ARE EQUALLY IMPORTANT AND DESERVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED—even if at first they seem to contradict our own. Because if there's one thing that I have learned during my short stint on this planet it's that if you listen closely enough and ask the right questions, you discover almost all of our needs are universal. They just sometimes come out sideways.
I think we've forgotten all this for a number of reasons. But one strikes me the hardest:
Our shift away from local community engagement.
The Internet is fantastic. But it pulls us away from tangible experience and exposure. WE ALL KNOW THIS. I am not bringing up anything groundbreaking here. But it's time to pay ATTENTION—like the addict who finally realizes she's got a problem. This is my best stab at a virtual (how f*cking ironic) intervention. When we get all of our information digitally, we live only through hearsay and facts we read behind a fourth wall—facts that we're consistently skeptical of because we know they might not be right but we also don't know how to check them ourselves. We don't connect. It's nearly impossible to feel like you're gaining anything from your community when you aren't engaging with it. So we're not GETTING. And we're not GIVING. We are shouting into a void. And half the country is on one side of the void, filtering out the other. And the other half is doing the same thing. And then we have a very public, very angry, very confusing political race that lands with half the country thinking, "How did we get here?" We got here because we're PLACING OURSELVES inside whatever bubble feels most comfortable for us! Imagine what kind of progress we'd make if instead of shouting things at a digital wall we could shout things into a room full of people — and we could read their expressions and their body language and we could see that, holy shit, there are a lot of people who are hurting and even if I don't totally agree with what they're fighting for they are NOT going to stop fighting for it. And maybe we'd be able to read their fears and their hurt and maybe we could come to some kind of understanding. But we can't because the only conversations we have aren't mediated. They aren't had in a productive setting—they aren't focused on problem solving. They're literally had online—in comments. And "opinion pieces" like this one.
So here's the silver lining, because I've made it my (self-proclaimed) job to find one in every situation.
The path may not always be lit, it may not always be wide, but I’ll be damned if I don’t make it my life’s work to look for it.
My first lesson is that our nation is divided in a much angrier way than I'd ever imagined. And the seed of anger is fear. And the NEED that quashes fear is "security." So. There are a lot of people on both sides seeking security. How can we prove that we are meeting this need for ALL of our people? Because everyone deserves to feel safe.
My second lesson is that we (I, but we) need to learn to be more active on a local level. We need to build from the ground up instead of expecting some white knight to sweep the nation off its feet and save us. I think people have gotten a little too comfortable in thinking our political system would "take care of itself." It won't. We'll have to hold our political system to it.
My third lesson is that I need to reach out to the people I am afraid of most—the people whose beliefs are totally foreign and sound absurd to me. Those are the people I need to do my best to understand. If I don't, this country will continue to push and pull against itself to no avail. Compromise isn't possible when compromise isn't even on the table.
If anything, this election proved to me that if I want to get shit done, I need to get off my ass and do it myself. I'm tired of everyone feeling disenfranchised. I'm tired of all the negativity clouding this country from seeing how absolutely beautiful, incredible, and versatile it is.
I'd like to work together to prove to our communities how valued they are. I'd like to work together to take care of each other instead of trying to tear each other down. I don't care if you're an old white man or a young Muslim girl—I want you to feel like your voices are heard and you've got something to believe in. And I will fight for that reality as long as I am able. I'll participate in social media if I have to, but I'll be looking for ways to use it to inspire boots on the ground—and to get my own boots on the ground. Because it's time to get off our asses and connect with each other. And I hope you will, too.