I’m legit scared for the future of my children for the first time in my history of having children; for the first time ever I am questioning the wisdom of having brought my incredible, beautiful children into an increasingly hostile environment. Was that decision based purely in hubris and entitlement? Regardless, it is done now, and it is still my primary responsibility to guide them and protect them through whatever troubled waters may be now, and may be to come.
When I try to grab a clear thought in terms of what is most urgent, my head bounces from politics, to covid, to the economy, to society as a whole; I am far beyond even pretending that I live in a democracy anymore; in place of a genuine concern for human rights and marginalized groups, there is a louder and louder barrage from bandwagons, politicians and especially, corporations, who have taken up the banner of some cause in order to serve their self-interested aims. In the face of incredible suffering due to a worldwide pandemic that has been raging for a year, I have seen very little genuine conversation amongst differing viewpoints, and more and more of partisan, extremist, inquisition-style dealings, shoving our own views down other peoples throats and continuing the hysteria that compounded in the four years that Trump was president. More and more I understand that Facebook and Twitter are the armpits of the internet. More and more I see people divided amongst themselves, actively trying to silence countering viewpoints, reporting their neighbours to the police, all the while sitting up on the great and mighty ego-horse of their own making. Oh, but oh my God, did you see that Karen meme? Other people are so crazy.
How do I explain to my children, without totally confusing them, that the majority of adults they will encounter these days, are lost? They haven’t grounded themselves in any coherent moral system (and by moral, I mean a set of guiding principles, not morals in the religious sense of adhering to dogma). They don’t have a north star that leads them out of the storms and doldrums of their lives; they are, in essence, rudderless, anchorless. In what direction can I point my children to show them examples of coherent, functioning groups of mature adults who understand that they must work together in order to move forward, whether they agree on every point or not? I don’t want to despair; but my options appear more and more limited. I am, by nature, a pessimist; I could never wrap my head around positive thinking, and have always felt the most honest when I was running contrary to the current; not dismissing it outright, but rigorously questioning it, not taking any narrative at face value. This is why I would send my pastor running every Sunday ( before ultimately leaving the church), because I was full of questions about the minutia, the things I couldn’t just accept as “fact” when life experience was demonstrating otherwise. I think it is fundamentally good to be suspicious of the given narrative, to ask lots of questions and try understand things from a variety of angles.
Today there are no more angles; every topic is separated into a flat, binary continuum: Left or right. Right or wrong. Cuckservatives or Libtards. Nothing in between; just two abhorrent manifestations at the extremes of politics and, so it seems, human life. Both hold the absolute truth and both are the absolute enemy, both are the liberators, saviours and bastions of truth, and both are buffoons and predators. Mainstream news has become utterly engulfed in this rhetoric, catering to the lowest common denominator who will share their “journalism” all over social media, thus temporarily saving their floundering institutions from the brink of financial death. Politicians all hang themselves with this same noose. And the people; the people follow suit.
The pandemic has been rough, really rough, in so many different ways for so many different people. Businesses are shutting down en masse while billionaires have lined their pocket with several billion dollars more each, and no signs of stopping. Children have missed school, families have been separated, couples have been splitting up; elderly people have died by the hundreds of thousands, alone and degraded by malnourishment and lack of hygiene. Populations are gaslit by their governments into thinking that the fault is in the hands, not of those administrating broken medical and social institutions, but that of the disobedient pleb, recklessly visiting their parents or neighbours after months of psychosis-inducing isolation. And so much of the populace goes along, acting as flying monkeys to the established narrative (in all it’s myriad and vacillating manifestations), shaming individuals publicly for daring to question the wisdom of those in charge, virtue signalling that THEY have been obedient citizens and followed ALL the rules without question, lamenting that their idiot neighbours are to blame for not just getting on board. It’s bullshit. It’s arrogance at it’s finest, laced with a heavy dose of self-victimization.
I am going to put forth a suggestion that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. We have all, by now, read the countless articles of the importance of self-care to get through the pandemic; of eating well, exercising, taking time out, disconnecting for a bit; of throwing zoom cocktail hours and taking long, masked walks whenever we can. Of not expecting perfection from yourself; of practicing self-compassion. Great, good, do it. I’m all for it. But what about compassion for others? Where is that essential component in this conversation? In the way I’ve observed most people interact online, it seems all but non-existent. There is an oft sung hymn that all our efforts surrounding the pandemic being a collective one; that we must all pull together and do our part to protect each other. This is a strange and vainglorious chorus in a social arena where it’s each one for himself and the lowest common denominator wins.
We are in a time of toxic-individualism, everything perpetually turning back to and revolving around the “Royal ME”. We are simultaneously more self-absorbed and more self-conscious than ever before, and how could we not be? The one inevitably leads to the other, because our focal point is always on the self, never on the whole, except when the whole interferes with the individuals expectations. The seemingly unending isolation due to the pandemic has only exacerbated this perpetual gazing back at the self. Marketing has coped on, and exploits it. “Do it for YOU,” “Be the BEST YOU,” seems the eternal chorus sung from every billboard. And shouldn’t we? Shouldn’t we take good care of ourselves, shouldn’t we invest in “Me”? Shouldn’t we strive to be our best selves? Like any truism, these statements are being distorted and exploited. They are the truth, but they neglect the reality that “Me” does not exist without “You” and certainly not without “Us”. For all of our ideas and stuff, we are still just animals, and we are animals that need a functioning group to survive. We need the other, always, in order to situate the “me” in time and space. This is true for even the most independent person. Those who try to live in denial of this fact tend to very quickly descend into a functional madness. Truly, this seems to be where most of us are existing right now: in a functional madness. It bears the semblance of real life, has all the nuts and bolts; but without the human connection, it loses it’s essence. As a result, we’re all getting sick.
My wildly radical suggestion is this: the antidote is compassion. The antidote is putting away the mudslinging and stepping over the tribal lines we’ve drawn. The antidote is critical thinking, the ability to question our own given narrative (even when we are convicted that we are %100 right), to put ourselves in the other persons shoes, to read between the lines. There is really no other way forward; if we continue to neglect compassion, genuine compassion ESPECIALLY for those we disagree with, then we will continue this steady decline into chaos. Genuine and mature conversation begins with one premise: You have the right to believe what you believe, but you do not have the right to impose it on me. I have the right to believe what I believe, but I do not have the right to impose it on you. “Impose” in this instance does not only mean with brute force, but neither with ridicule, derision or condescension or shaming. No matter how we might disagree, we maintain the integrity of the human being in front of us; or more likely these days, on the other side of a computer screen. There is no genuine, impactful discourse without it. Sadly, we don’t have many examples of it today, so modelling ourselves on people of integrity is a challenge. Politicians argue and bully one another like children in the schoolyard. The 2020 presidential “debate” was evidence that, even the highest ranking politicians of the day do not actually understand the structure of a debate. Social media influencers rack up views from trashing one another and actively seeking to get someone else cancelled. It’s a really sad state of affairs.
This is what makes me worry for my children, as I try frantically to point them toward legitimate role models. We think that we are above the culture we function within, that we are the true “individuals” we’re encouraged to be, but it’s simply not the case. We are socially and culturally bound to one another, dialectically informed and changed by one another. It is delusion to imagine otherwise. Changing the tide will require an enormous collective effort that begins with the individual who chooses to react differently. Who vows to themselves to assess and look for nuance before reacting in the same old way. The individual who fearlessly seeks for common ground, even with those who seem least like them. This is maturity. This is wisdom based living. This is freedom from reactionary politics that are making us all ill. This is how the tide turns for the better.