The Last Ride of the Crash Test Dummies
I keep meaning to sit down and formulate some brilliant summary of our current situation. Honestly, I’m just about out of gas. This has been, for most of the past decade, a fun job. Yes, we’ve covered tough stories. Heartbreak is inevitable when something like Sandy Hook or the Route 91 shootings happens, but even then, there’s an opportunity to push for better mental health services and more rational public policy.
Maybe part of the reason I’ve been able to process those terrible stories is because there’s a villain to blame. There’s a reason, no matter how inscrutable or irrational or simply revolting. A ‘Why?’ that can usually be answered even when the truth is unsatisfying.
Today there is no villain. There isn’t a reason. Intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually I’m unsatisfied. There is no catharsis and I’m forced to sit with an uncertainty that eats away at every aspect of life.
Will my job be here in six months?
Can I provide for my family some other way?
Are my wife and children safe?
Am I prepared to meet the challenge of my own standards, to insist on truth and facts and empathy balanced with liberty, privacy, and the greater good?
When you compound the individual, private turmoil most Americans are facing with the casual cruelty of anonymous cowards and belligerent assholes both online and out in the world simply remaining civil becomes a challenge.
In 1942 one of my favorite authors, Robert A. Heinlein, coined the phrase “An armed society is a polite society,” an idea that still resonates in the 21st century. But online there’s little danger of being embarrassed or intimidated by someone who isn’t in the room. That’s led to a decay in discourse. That’s not to say that I think shooting someone for being a dick is appropriate. But it’s become embarrassingly clear that too many people were kept in check by the possibility of interpersonal or social consequences, rather than an internal compass guiding them to higher ground.
It’s forced me to consider the possibility that my religious friends were on to something with the argument that man requires divine guidance in order to live peacefully and righteously. It also lends some credibility to Zimbardo’s conclusions following the Stanford Prison Experiment.
There’s a perverted sense of power in saying something horrible to another human being. I should know, I worked in Rock Radio for a while and shocking people into an intense reaction made for awesome phone calls. Outrage IS funny…to the provocateur. Howard Stern made millions by walking that line. He also destroyed his marriage and alienated God knows how many others along the way.
Only Howard could tell you if it was worth it, and then only for himself. There’s a generation of Howard Stern wannabes who went from on-the-air to waiting tables and selling insurance who will likely affirm that the juice was not worth the squeeze.
Social media has provided a platform for anyone with a Boost Mobile account to imitate the superficial formula: Troll Culture. To my unfortunate surprise it’s gone mainstream. People are bored and anxious it’s infesting every thread and post. And there’s no limit to the stupidity and cruelty, because without a line to cross it’s just a race to the bottom that looks like a freefall to anyone who understands why the lines of civility exist and what the cost of crossing them can be.
What’s missing is mindful intent. Pushing the envelope became the last ride of the crash test dummies.
I meant what I said about ditching Social Media this week. I have no desire to control how other people interface with the world, but I’m increasingly certain that until there’s some breakthrough at the societal level the banality of people who imagine themselves as virtual tyrants and toughguys is going to rob me of what energy I have left for the fight ahead.
And there is a fight ahead. As we reopen our city and our state there will be a second wave of Novel Coronavirus. The paranoid and the misinformed will continue to play on the fears of the desperate and the hungry. Businesses will suffer and people will die.
Ethan Kytle, history professor at Fresno State, contributed a special column to the Fresno Bee this week. In it he shares that during the Spanish Flu epidemic we tried a more stringent shelter-in-place model, that as the first wave of infections subsided the restrictions were lifted, and a second wave hit. In the winter of 1918-1919 Fresno lost 258 lives. If you scale that death toll per capita to our city’s current population we would see 3,000 deaths today.
As we did then, Fresno has managed to keep the cost of Coronavirus lower than our big city cousins. That should be a point of pride, but the cesspool of social media has made half-truths and bad data the foundation of a pushback that will undermine our hard-won victories.
Be wary of conformity for conformity’s sake. Never assume authority is right simply because it dresses well and speaks enticingly. Likewise, understand that the easy way is rarely the most fruitful and that there are men and women who will tap into fear and uncertainty to create chaos.
There are also men and women who will use the cover of chaos to promote themselves and advance agendas otherwise unpalatable to thinking people. Troll culture is making it impossible for anyone but the most strident and outrageous voices to be heard. Fools with atrophied consciences are being encouraged to degrade the signal-to-noise ratio in every conversation, not understanding that they won’t be the smiling heroes of an imaginary anarchist utopia, but instead they serve only as useful idiots until the ambitious actors pulling their strings have exhausted their utility and shed them like the dead skin of some grinning lizard.
Save your selves. Insist on truth, no matter how unpleasant. Demand honesty, no matter how uncomfortable. Beware flattery and fantasy. Ruminate on Proverbs 16:18.
The podcast will be online a little later tonight, but I think there’s some good stuff in there. Certainly, there was a lot to think about as we look forward to hearing more from Mayor Brand, Governor Newsom, and President Trump tomorrow.
Stay Weird.