Every morning, after taking care of my mom’s needs, and getting things in order, I take some time to read the news, which is always a mistake, because ignorance is clearly bliss. That said, if I’m going to be miserable, I’m going to be informed in my misery. I cannot abide ignorance, even at the cost of my sanity.
I read the news, I zip about Facebook for a little bit, I check comments on message boards, check my email, and then I go back to taking care of what I need to take care of. I get several stops during the day to come back and look around, because let’s be honest, the internet is my only window to the outside world, and I will take every opportunity I can to glance outside and see what fresh new hell awaits us all.
Something I have always loved engaging in, and I mean always, is people watching. When I was a child, while other kids would run around playing cowboys and indians, I would watch the adults sitting and chatting on the porch, or in the kitchen. I would listen to their conversations. I’d pick up new words, learn ways to say things and to not say things, and to conceal what I really thought, because I had heard in private things that some adults would never say in the company of others.
As I grew older, I began to understand all of the context surrounding the memories in my head. I learned about public faces, and private faces. I learned about what you said in polite company, and what you abstained from saying. It was all issued under the guise of being cordial, of not appearing rude. You may not have agreed with your relative/friend/acquaintance, but you didn’t openly rebuke them, at least not as a general rule.
We, of course, don’t follow this quite as closely anymore. With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and dozens of other social media sites that allow direct connections with others, many of us just lay it all out. If we don’t like what you say, we can ban you from our page, we can scream at you, or call you a piss wallowing scrotum gargler with delusions of grand fuckery.
There’s not much that hasn’t been said. In fact, the things unsaid list has grown quite anemic these past 10 years, which is when social media started hitting its stride. Of course, now there are people growing up who have never experienced a conversation where there are things left unsaid. It’s rather fascinating to observe.
This avenue does allow for positive things: it’s easier for us to praise the people we follow, those we admire. They can hear directly from their fans and supporters exactly what is running through their precious little minds. Social media sites can help us keep connected to old friends whom we never thought we’d see again. It’s even possible to make new friends, migrating from a forum to Facebook, and build lasting friendships we’d have otherwise missed out on.
Of course, that leaves the rather considerable downside: assholes. Yep. Assholes control the internet. They make it dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge its way through the human psyche, and around the globe. That’s “across the disc” if you’re a flat earther. Just trying to help you keep up. Anyway, if it were confined to the internet, that would be one thing, but as always art imitates life imitates art, and what was once online and never spoken in public, has now moved its sorry ass offline and directly into public.
Now we get to live the human experience of reading about assholes, only to go to the store and encounter those same assholes, but without the things best left unsaid. I’m not painting a picture that says no one was ever rude before the internet. Fuck my balls, I worked in customer service back in the mid-1990s, right before the internet became a huge phenomenon, and I can swear to you that there were glorious assholes who would give any Youtube commenter a run for his or her money.
What I’m saying, though, is that we are becoming meaner, and we are expressing it more vocally, whether it be through text on a screen, or up in someone face at the grocery store. We’re seeing it at town hall meetings, and at football games. There is the understanding that, in U.S. economics, the gap between the super rich and the very poor is getting wider and wider exponentially faster every day.
I think the same thing is happening with our ability to deal with other human beings. Those who are raging assholes, and those who don’t wish to confront others at all are in an ever widening gap. Tell somebody that Star Trek is an awful TV show, and you’ll either get “eh, whatever” or “FUCK THE FUCK OFF YOU CUNTFUCKING GIBBERY FUCK! SUCK MY DICK WITH A BADGER COCK!”
The wretched hive of scum and villainy has expanded considerably. I find myself falling out of sync with a great many people because of it. I’ve become so tired of jumping from one extreme to the other over simple opinions, and the field of politics is worse! Granted, heated debate and even caustic sloganeering in politics has always existed, but now we’ve got the government in on it. Our President called peaceful protestors of institutional racism “sons of bitches,” and he got a great many people to echo his sentiments.
Suffice to say that this is not normal, but it is becoming the new normal. I never thought Idiocracy would come so soon, but yeah, if the President came out in a flag tank top, and fired a machine gun into the air telling people to shut the fuck up, there would be loud cheering from a significant number of the population. It’s terrifying, and the more I observe all of these things happening, the more I realize there has been a fundamental paradigm shift between what used to be discourse, and what is now acceptable discourse. It’s not that I want true feelings to be hidden, what I don’t want is for people to consider dehumanization of individuals, or whole groups of people, to be a valid political conversation.
There’s a reason why words have power. Words are attached to concepts, ones that guide our brains in how we interpret the world around us. The more we start to accept that people don’t have to be people, that they can be something less if we just use the right terminology, well hell, we know where that leads. We know what happens when people have their humanity removed by anonymous hordes who face no punishment for their actions.
It makes me sick to my stomach, and we’re not even a year yet into this current presidency. The more people become numb to this, the more they decide that an opinion is enough to silence others, to retaliate against others, to *murder* others, we have truly lost as a nation. How much longer do we have? Every day I see us descending gleefully into this pit, further and further, picking up speed, and handfuls of mud to throw at each other in terrifying glee.
We’ve gone beyond insults. This isn’t really about insults. It’s about things said and unsaid, and how they once balanced each other out. Now everything is spoken, including the words that were once used to eradicate populations. Some feel it is better we hear these unsaid words now, so that we know what people are truly thinking, but the thing is those unsaid words were only unsaid because they were too reprehensible to speak. Now that they’re out in public again, they will gain strength. An outrageous idea that is repeated over and over again eventually loses the quality of outrage. It becomes normal to hear it, normal to experience it firsthand, or even to use it against others.
Words are powerful tools. Our current president uses his words like a sack of doorknobs, clobbering all who stand in his way. It’s brutish, vile, inelegant, and barbaric, and he has no intention of stopping. The people he has brought with him, that corrupt gang of fools, those harlots of avarice and greed, use this to their advantage, and we’re all suffering for it.
I no longer feel like I’m in a society that once praised education, that valued intellect, that rewarded ingenuity. While individual elements fight to rectify this, many instead choose to embrace it, delighting in the bloodbath of fact by the guns and knives of ignorance. More and more I wish to step back, to step out, but I can’t, because I sit squarely in the center, the midwest, the heart of it all. Where do I go from here? Where do we go? I wish I had another way to end this entry today, but I don’t. I simply don’t know.