"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it." -- Maya Angelou.
Not Normal At All
We settle into the new not normal. The state of the union is not normal and must remain unsettled until things are set right again. So what have I been thinking about this week? Information literacy, understanding the other side (or not), and listening.
Information literacy is critical. And I think this election has shown just how far away from information literacy we have in this country right now. Both sides are polarized by fake news, it's all over - Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others are pledging to try to reduce the fake news sources passed through them. The echo chambers have grown, and people seem to be more interested in what's going to engage their outrage than they are in understanding what's actually going on with any sense of nuance. Some of the conspiracies are really outlandish. The polarization means we're talking past each other because we're not only not on the same page, arguing the same thing, we're not even reading the same book.
How do you identify a good resource? How do you read to understand bias, both in your own bias as well as what's against your bias? How do you identify who to trust in this world when truth can and often is stranger than fiction? Why should we support newspapers when we can get the news on tv and the internet for "free"? So many questions. So many things that require just enough more effort that it seems a lot of people would rather let outrage filter take over.
One of the things I've heard a lot over the last two weeks online is the exhortation to 'try to understand the other side.' I even linked one of those articles here, as I was trying to process what was going on with the disparity in perspectives before the election. And the more I hear 'you have to understand', and the more I see what the president-presumably-elect's actions are, the more I think that I *do* understand and I understand the common ground between me and anyone that I "need to understand" is tenuously thin.
The argument seems to be that there's a large group of people who feel like their way of life is being lost and... I understand that because they're not alone in that. They think everyone else is getting something they're not getting, but that's not the case. And they think because their way of life is disappearing that... everyone's way of life should disappear to support their idyllic fantasy nostalgia? Nah, bro. And honestly, with the outrage coming from the republican side of things, it seems a lot of people didn't really want a return to some economic stability, they wanted a world in which they could use slurs, get away with lynching and rape, because... because why? Illusions of power they never had in the first place. And don't get to take now... but only if we all step outside of our civic comfort to read all the guidelines and not just do easy things like wearing a safety pin (wear it, I don't care, but it's not nearly enough effort towards the change we need for anyone to allow themselves to feel good about). Call, write letters, petition, show up in person, have difficult conversations, listen, and think about whose voices you are prioritizing.
Listening is hard. Echo chambers, by their nature, echo the voices of those who surround us. These voices become loud and drown out other voices. This in combination with the inclination to favor outrage and emotive reactions rather than facts and reality - where reality is what happens, not what someone is trying to create by manipulating the present - means it's almost impossible to hear other voices. For me, this has been playing out in two ways.
One is the first which I've already talked about - "you have to understand the other side." As someone that leans left, but is also pretty finicky about information literacy as a matter of professional necessity, the ugliness and extremity that I see sends me into near shut down. As they say, you can't reason with crazy. And you can't really have a transformative conversation when you can't expect good faith or best intent. In the best cases, having a conversation seems to take an approach that is closer to hostage negotiations than anything else. The patience to return, time and time again to common ground, working from there to convince... These voices we're being told we need to prioritize to understand are white, mostly men's voices. Which... don't we already prioritize those voices? Is this a demand that we continue to only prioritize white men's voices? Because that's sort of what this feels like...
The second way this has been playing out is that I have been consciously trying to prioritize the voices of my friends of color, my lgbtia friends, and my alternatively faithed friends. Which brings me back to the safety pin for just a moment. Part of what I was thinking about when I was pulling apart safety pins as a sign was the voices of my friends for whom it was just another sign of ineffective white allies. The people of color on my facebook thread on the topic were the ones who were the ones agreeing wholeheartedly with my concerns about the safety pin. White people were the ones who were really defensive about how they were gonna wear it because it might comfort someone. I think maybe because I've been trying to prioritize non-white, etc voices for a long time, I have a different perspective on the effects of colonization as well, and how people who have had to exist with the effects of colonization feel obliged to act in a particular way to signs of power. One of which is now a safety pin - it's a signifier of privilege that may, or may well not, be of assistance in any given situation. But hey, if it makes you feel good, or you think it's going to help someone else, go for it.
There's been a lot of populations who have been telling us that things are real bad. And when Trump was elected they were all, mmm, yeah, so here we are again. They weren't surprised. It's just another day with more of the same. Maybe a lot more of the same, but it's the same America they've been living in and telling us about. It's just about to get worse for a bunch more of us. Whose voices do we choose to prioritize? And how do we do it? Do we actually ask them what they need or do we decide and tell them what we'll provide? I say we in this case, as a white woman with recognized privilege, as someone who is being asked to talk to "my people" because you don't ask the victim to educate the victimizer (bullies tend not to listen so well to their victims, as it turns out).
Not that I was immune to surprise - I truly want to believe that most people are operating from best intentions... and that faith has been deeply shaken. However, I think that despite being shaken, it's also the only way to step forward through to change, by recognizing, and asking others, to step into their best possible being.
The story that comes to mind about some of this is the story of the stone soup. A stranger came to a very poor town. The harvest had not been kind and tensions were running high. The stranger was very hungry and asked, for a while, person to person, "can you spare some food?" No, no, no, no. Finally the stranger asked someone who said "Yes, you may borrow my biggest pot." In the center of town, the stranger set a fire, put the pot on the fire and put a stone in some water to boil. Someone came along and asked what was happening and the stranger said, oh, I'm making stone soup! It'll be the most amazing soup *ever* if only I could get an onion or two. Well, that wasn't a big deal, and the stranger got a couple onions. Pretty soon someone else came by and asked what was going on. The stranger said, making stone soup! I've got a couple onions, but you know what would make it amazing? Some carrots... and well, that wasn't such a big deal and so now the soup had onions and carrots. This continued all afternoon, and the scent of the soup drifted all through the town attracting people who would find well, it wasn't such a big deal to contribute a.... anyway, dinner time rolled around and the stranger had way more than enough for everyone in town to eat. For some of the townspeople, this would be the first solid meal in a while.
Society is requisitely communal in nature. People are meant to take care of each other. As Melanie Dewberry says, "We belong to each other." Maybe our tribes have grown too large and we haven't grown from the small territorial mentality of our ancestors to the hive mentality of a city. But for us to succeed as a nation, we must take care of each other. Destroyed fabric of society and culture benefits no one.
So time for us to step up and figure out how to effectively take care of each other.
In solidarity & curiosity,
-- Susan