Who we are, and how to fix it (maybe)

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

I think it was Reader’s Digest that used to run, in prehistoric times, a feature called “Life in These United States,” which featured odds and ends, anecdotes and blarney from various parts of the U.S., presumably to show us to ourselves.

Reader’s Digest is long gone, I was about to write, but a quick Google search tells me it’s still around. Its cultural heyday is done, however; it no longer sits in most homes, relentlessly instilling its own homey brand of Americanism throughout the land.

We now discover who we are on Cable TV and the Internet.

I just got in a stupid fight on Facebook with a guy who thinks AI companies have the right to suck up all the information on the web, including copyrighted books and other copyrighted material, with no holds barred, all in the cause of the greater glory of technology and unstoppable progress.

Just now (and probably never) do I have the patience to get into a deeply thought out analysis of this topic. I’ll leave that to the lawyers for a bunch of big-name writers who are suing the big AI companies over just this issue, which is similar to some of the issues the Hollywood writers and actors have been striking over. What good is a copyright, or a contract, if AI can grab everything and use it forever, with no constraints or restrictions.

My more immediate point is how stupid it is — and I’ve done it myself, just now even — to fight with total strangers on Facebook, or “X” (which everyone seems to still call Twitter), and the like.

How many brain cells have I killed over this kind of thing? How many times have I caused my blood pressure to shoot up over something stupid, or mean, or mindless someone’s said to me, or to an actual friend of mine, or just to the universe, on social media?

The only answer is innumerable times, way too many times. And the next question, obviously, is why? Why do I get sucked in?

The bigger picture, though, is why do all of us get sucked in, to different degrees, and the answer, I think, is how isolated our society has made many of us, in part with our own collaboration.

I’ve had several discussions recently with friends and neighbors about this: how lonely so many people are, and not just oldsters like me. I’ve written about this for several small local nonprofit newsletters in my newly adopted town of Portland — at least one of my essays has even leapfrogged into a “mini-” form of syndication, when a couple of other local newsletters asked for permission to use my column.

What all of this shows is that, even without doing any research except talking to a few people and looking into my own experiences, is that I’ve found that loads of people right now are desperately seeking a sense of community, a sense of belonging.

That desperation is mirrored too in our politics.

It’s not bothsiderism, I don’t think, to point out that extremists and true believers on both sides, the far right and the more extreme left, have lost track of the need for a basic sense of community that is shared with everyone, even those you don’t like, don’t admire, can’t stand, or have little in common with.

Like being part of a neighborhood. Or a town. A state. A nation.

I have a tiny wisp of hope that enough people are starting to get this, grok this in the ‘60s terminology, to perhaps begin to make a difference.

If Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (a man I despise), for example, were to finally cave in and work on forming a temporary “alliance of the sane” linking House Democrats and the ultra-quiet but still extant supply of moderately conservative to very conservative but still sane members of his own party, some of the insanity that’s splitting the nation apart and wrecking its institutions could, perhaps, be drained away, like pus from a wound.

Almost everyone, except the true nut jobs, is getting truly fed up.

We shall see.

In the meantime, I hope to retrieve enough of my own sanity to forego stupid social media interactions.

Better to post photos of flowers and peruse my friends’ photos of visits to far-off lands, while doing my best in other forums to help build a better world.

Just don’t get me started on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.