It's completely insane to me how much has been going on over the last month. Both at-home and abroad. I honestly think there's no possible way to be up to date in any complete way when it comes to current events. It's only been a month since the SCOTUS over-turned Roe V Wade, and it's almost out of the news cycle.
Like higher academics, you pretty much have to specialize in one type of news item if you want to feel like you've attained any kind of comprehensive understanding of the subject. You can't just follow news regarding domestic politics, for example, and consider yourself comprehensively informed on the subject (assuming one is being honest with one's self).
It's overwhelming. Even for experts. I've said this before in this blog, but I feel it deserves to be repeated: Humans aren't equipped to take in as much as we take in on a daily basis in our modern, technologically advanced world. It's too much information to take in. If you go to CNN or Fox News websites, there's approximately 14 headlines sitting below a banner with the most urgent of alerts. There's no way you can read all 14 headlines and keep up with the constant updates of the alerts. Not to mention all the editorials. So basically, you end up with enough time to read all the headlines, skim an actual article or two, watch a video clip to try and get a synopsis of one of the articles you couldn't read, sign in to your social media to be overwhelmed by articles you definitely don't have the time to read, and then land in some YouTube rabbit hole of videos (both user and corporate generated) that prey on your worries and fears....or aim to distract you from putting any serious thought into anything your brain has been fed throughout the day.
And keep in mind...I say this as a person who still only uses a flip phone. I can't imagine what kind of current event-induced mental (and emotional) overload owners of the magic rectangles experience.
This doesn't even take into account the day to day stresses of life; job, school, relationships with other people in your immediate sphere of existence, finances, pleasure, etc.
It's impossible to have anything other than a very superficial understanding of the whole picture when it comes to the current events. And I think it's one of the things that feeds the division in the country. If you only have a superficial knowledge (nevermind actual understanding) of facts, all that's left is emotion and opinion. We have a lot of people who (justifiably, imo) have only a superficial knowledge (again, not necessarily understanding) of what's going on in the world. The vast majority of us are seeing things that challenge the very core of biases we might have, and there's a backlash to that. I think the mix of emotions and the challenging of biases (with accompanying backlash) is making an already tenuous peace (intra- and inter- nationally) turn into a field of powder kegs....some of which are randomly exploding under the pressure.
Another drum I beat is the "technology is good, but we're not using it right and we might not be ready for this level of connection yet" drum pretty steadily on this blog.
One reason is that I feel this extreme technological connectedness looks like a lot of other human advancements that ended up causing insane amounts of damage to humanity.. So I'm going to compare the Internet to factories.
The advent of factories, and their capacity for mass production, is an amazing human achievement. It has created heightened equality in terms of quality of life for a larger and larger portion of the human population. It's allowed for other innovations, like the automobile. These are great achievements.
We embraced factories and automobiles. We let our imaginations and creativity and knowledge and drive push these things to their limits, and then created newer and newer limits. And in the process, we spent decades (and eventually centuries) dumping toxic materials in soil and water. We put toxins in the materials we produced. We burnt through precious fuel supplies...so on and so forth.
We took great ideas and ran with them, but never stopped to think about the consequences.
I think the same can be said about the internet. We've created something with great potential. But instead of taking it slow and really thinking through the pro's and con's without stifling innovation....well, we ended up with this mess.. We created mind-pollution. We argue over every stupid thing. We argue about fictional pizza sex dungeons run by politicians, we argue about which coke-headed, toxic Hollywood star we side with in some stupid, over-long defamation trial, we somehow still argue about whether or not the world is spherical(-ish).... and we don't even nuse words to argue half the time. We use memes and 10 sec (or less) reaction videos. We sit and tell someone from "the other side" how stupid and superficial their meme argument is by...posting a stupid and superficial meme argument.
Hind-sight is 20/20. We made a mess with factories and automobiles (and plastics and paint and metals and wood and. arable land...etcetcetc). We are in the process of understanding the mess we made, and we're trying to clean up those messes. Unfortunately, we're kind of making a mess of our collective psyche with our new toys (including, but not limited to, the internet and all that goes with that). So many people who never left an area outside of their little corner of the world were now encountering people from all over the world on a daily basis. Some people embraced the experience and chose to learn more about each other and try to build bridges without sacrificing individuality. Others chose to sequester themselves in a small virtual world with people who only thought like them. This sequestering phenomenon is true for the right and the left and religion/philosophy A and religion/philosophy B and lifestyle choice A and B and on and on. Just to be clear. A few small, but loudly intolerant, groups poison the well for everyone else. They get the ratings, so they get the headlines and the trending hashtags. And the illusion that the entirety of America is thirsty for the second Civil War looks pretty realistic. And the pressure to "choose a side" grows.
America IS diverse, in so many ways. And in that diversity, there's going to be fundamental differences that require compromise for all involved. If America isn't a union of 50 states (and some territories), it doesn't really stand tall in the global scene. If you go too far to one ideology, you alienate a segment of our international allies (as we saw in the 45th presidency). The economic power of America would be gone. You can't split the country in half and expect either half to have the same presence economically (or diplomatically) as the union of 50 diverse states who work together for a common good.
There IS a lot going on in the world right now. A lot of important things that will impact the present and the future in major ways. Just like every other moment in history. Another drum I bang hard on this blog is "these things have always been happening, we're just more aware of them". We've lost the innocence of small scale society. We're a global culture now. That means we have to find a way to create cohesion without denying anyone their respective culture, or letting others take our respective cultures from us (I use "culture" broadly here). You cultivate that kind of attitude at home. America is in the perfect position to be a leader in cultivating a more harmonious global community by showing we can do it at home.
I don't know how we can achieve that without slowing things down a bit, just in terms of what we're digesting day to day. Organizations like CNN and Fox are perfectly capable of taking responsibility and saying "we need to stop trying to create a an alarmist culture where people are scared the Proud Boys and Antifa are going to have a street battle, while racists from all races clash with each other and the police all while under sniper fire during a natural disaster or 12". They don't have to send you clickbait, alarmist updates to your device every two minutes. They can lay off the hyperbole. They can do a lot of things, if the ultimate goal is to inform the public and help the public understand the events of the day. If the bottom line is just monetary, then you have to prioritize the dollar at any cost. You have to create a culture that relies on all the clicks. And we, the consumer, can take responsibility. We can chose to consume less, and consume things that don't make us hate one another without fully understanding one another. We can chose to stop feeling that we need to dominate each other, and instead chose to start embracing the "united" part of united states.
Intolerance has always existed, and it will probably exist forever, to one degree or another. One group is always going to find reasons to dislike a certain group....or even all other groups. We need to stop giving intolerance and anger and violence and hopeless division a megaphone. We need to find a way to stay informed and connected in a way that's more balanced and less of a constant avalanche of doom and gloom. At the end of the day we have to make the conscious decision to choose unity over a false duality of "oppress or be oppressed". We have the choice to work together without forcing "the other" to become "us", and without sacrificing individuality in all its facets. It may mean, for example, that some states will not allow abortions in their borders. You accept that that is the current reality and you work to find a way to come to some compromise so that raped 10 year old girls don't have to have their rapists baby tear their body apart. Because a fucking 10 year old is NOT fucking ready to push a fully grown fetus/child out of their body. And so that same 10 year old isn't a criminal for not wanting to have to go through that trauma. There has to be a compromise from both sides. That means researching, talking, making theses, researching more, making syntheses, more research, and then...eventually, finding good solutions that can be a basis for building even better solutions.
I was once on CNN's website, and on the same front page there were who knows how many articles about the insanity of our current world, and next to the doom and gloom there was an article by Dr. Gupta (the CNN chief medical guy) about the dangers of doom scrolling. So I closed the tab without looking at a single article.
After I closed the tab, I went and did some math, because that's how I best contribute to the world. And then I took a hike (oh, ps...I moved back to Oregon as soon as my student housing lease at Stony Brook ended. I'll discuss that later), because that's a good way form me to get my mind clear and healthy. And then I read a few articles on things I'm interested in (racial relations, economics, climate change). I ranted about my more...emotion-based... thoughts on that stuff, and to my brogad, as well as some personal stuff. (Shout out to the ear that hears me..).
And at no time did I feel like I had to break a window or scream at a cop for no reason or storm a government building or threaten (or attack) a politician I didn't agree with. I also didn't need to go on to a social media site or 4 to stir up controversy with poor spelling, poor grammar, and even worse non-arguments based on poor understanding of hyperbolic headlines.
I think we can find a way, in this country, to be unified with the ability to disagree without ensuring mutual destruction. I think we can be civil and flexible and offer people options. In other words, I think we can live up to the ideals of a democratic republic. We just have to chose it. And I think part of that has to be knowing when too much information is too much information.
I'm currently kind of invested in how the 6 January hearings are going. I've been following the news on that. It's an important step in holding the people responsible accountable for what will be known as one of the most infamous days in American history. I watch the clips and read the articles about that. And it's really easy to get caught up in watching whole videos of peoples testimonies. I'm not watching the live streams all day or anything, but if there's a video of one key witness' testimony, I definitely watch. But the point is, it becomes over-load when everything is being pushed in your face. Even stuff you weren't initially concerned with.
I can't really say I have any good solution to the problem of over-load due to over-saturation of media, much less the jolt of the rapid global culture shift that came with the exponential technological growth we've experienced in the last few generations. I mean, no one really does. It's a new problem for humanity, and we don't really fully understand the pathology.