The All or Nothing of Grief
The All or Nothing of Grief
A painful path for a centrist
Sometimes it pains me to visualize myself in the fabric of public discourse. I’m not famous or anything but I admittedly have an audience. I was around when Facebook launched on a select set of college campuses. I was there when Instagram was an app where you shared of-the-moment phone pics and applied questionable filters to them. And now, social media is awash in culture and politics, e-commerce and “thought leadership🤮.”
If you’re alive then you can’t help but acknowledge how polarized the digital world is. Every single topic of debate seems to be filled with constituents that hold their ground as if they were cheering for their hometown sports team. This is the same behavior I’ve noticed from people in their shares around traumatic events and grief.
Today it’s Daunte Wright, but you can pull any Black name out of a hat. I’m not here to write a dissertation about the pain and sorrow of Black death. I’m not here to host a referendum on use of force in policing. I’m just here to pontificate a little about why we as humans gravitate towards extremes - or rather, push against the need to do it. Here is a sampling of some quotes I’ve pulled from story shares on Instagram today (paraphrasing just to highlight the sweeping part of the statement):
@ACLU: “Black people living in America are constantly at risk of state-sponsored violence and death.”
@Danez_Smif via @diet_prada: “It is safer to be a white man who just killed multiple people than it is to be a Black person in a traffic stop and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how abundant, unflinching, and grounded racism is in this awful country, I don’t know what to tell you.”
@Padmalakshmi: “Meanwhile white mass shooters are consistently arrested unscathed.”
Attention, Persuasion, and Feelings…
Knowingly, I think the reason we post on social platforms is for attention. This isn’t a bad thing. Attention is good for selling things or promoting awareness around social issues. But attention itself requires some sort of evocative nature or quality. So, overtime, we’ve learned (algorithms have told us) that if we care about views or engagement we need to construct posts for the best and highest possible impact. What good is just saying the truth plainly when the algorithm will fly on by and give your content zero love and affection? Besides, humans are geared towards the excitement as well - a break from the norm.
There’s attention, and there’s also persuasiveness. In a full-throated face-to-face discussion, I think you’d find that it requires logic, fact-based cooperation, and an open-mind for persuasion to exist. In the digital world, all you can count on is trying to use logic because facts are no longer subject to universal agreement and open-minds have been on the decline even before social media was created. Instead, we lean further into constructing evocative, logic-based “gotcha’s” as our basis for increasing the potential of virality. Oftentimes, I don’t think it’s even at the front of a person’s mind that their share is going to persuade anyone. Into the void, we scream and preach.
Feelings over facts is the era we are living in. You’ll hear phrases like “lived experience,” or “as a cisgender hetero male.” Excuse me if I didn’t say that correctly, I’m still learning. However, the point is to disclaim that you’re not a speaker for the monolith, as you share from your perspective while seemingly still speaking for the identity category you belong to. Basically, it’s a focus on politic correctness. It is true that if you feel a way, then it establishes a truth for you. But that truth is only a fact from the perspective that you have ownership over how you feel and how you’d like to resolve the impact of that feeling. It is not a basis for deciding whether an action did or did not take place. It is not a basis for establishing whether something is or is not. But now feelings and facts are conflated, and communal selfishness has made feelings the victor over facts.
All three of these things - attention, persuasion, and feelings - have this tacit ability to push our thinking to the extremes. If you need to gain attention or notoriety, well maybe you need to do something big or loud to get noticed. If you need to persuade someone in 150 characters, you’ll probably need something witty and evocative whether or not truth is adhered to - it’s soundbite after all. And when feelings are involved, like grief or euphoria, you’re often anchored to an unmovable location until time and distance from an event has taken effect. By dent, these words don’t hang around other words like subtlety, balance, or neutrality.
Just think about the phrases from above:
“Black people living in America are constantly at risk of state-sponsored violence and death.”
Leaving the prison system out for the moment, Blacks are disproportionately killed by law enforcement in the context of population distribution. However, in absolute terms we have worse problems to consider.
For context, there are 47.8 million (14.6% of the population) Black people living in the US. (Black Demographics). Mathematically, not many people are getting gunned down period, but alas I’m not an unfeeling. I’d love to reduce death overall as an exercise in compassion and humanity regardless.
Again, I’m not including prisons and the role of law enforcement and criminal laws as they play a part in the inequality and unevenness of justice in this nation but I’m just showing how extreme our talking points are around police shootings in general.
“It is safer to be a white man who just killed multiple people than it is to be a Black person in a traffic stop and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how abundant, unflinching, and grounded racism is in this awful country, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Anecdotally this feels right, doesn’t it? I conjure my memories of Dylann Roof massacring a Black church then getting a trip to Burger King. The Unibomber blowing up an abortion clinic, and being apprehended peacefully after a manhunt. Those thoughts sit next to visuals of a Black man running from a cop and getting gunned down, not only unarmed but in retreat. That’s not to say mass shooters haven’t been killed by police either (the ones that didn’t commit suicide).
What I really want to hone in on is “this awful country.” Subjective, so this can be true to whoever says it or receives it as such. But, playing devil’s advocate - is this truly an awful country? Are all of our days filled with immense sadness and misery? Is there a Black genocide that I didn’t notice? There are tons of awful things happening in this country - it’s a country with over 320 million people. We can’t even manage the DMV well, so yes, it’s hard to govern and provide equitable outcomes for all but I think largely we try. Largely, we do care about one another even if social media says otherwise. But that’s my subjective opinion too.
“Meanwhile white mass shooters are consistently arrested unscathed.”
By the way, remember the D.C. snipers? Two Black men that went on a killing spree on the beltway. They were apprehended without shots fired. Just another anecdote to toss into the non-statistical fire.
A collective IV drip of trauma creates collective misery.
Just a reminder, since we’ve come a long way together, I’m not making excuses. I’m not arguing that racism isn’t a major issue in the US. I’m not arguing that policing doesn’t need reform. I have opinions about most things in the US and many of them are views towards change or rebuke of standards. I’m simply writing about our lack of care and appreciation for accuracy in communication. Mainly, whether conscious or subconscious, we’ve elevated this new form of “entertainment” as a delivery system for communication and virtue. Entertainment is a great mechanism for attention, and persuasion, but breaks apart easily when truth and accuracy are of concern. This gets worse when entertainment is constrained by character count.
It’s hard enough when we are talking about topics that don’t have urgency or immediacy attached in a tangible way. For instance, I guess I can feel away about climate change but it’s also like charging things on a credit card - cognitively, you’ll deal with it later. Add the urgency of galvanizing protestors to correct the injustice of another Black son or father by a white police officer, and you’ve got an emotional tornado. These moments of trauma are even more primed for extreme language and blind spots.
I’m always afraid to be the centrist in the room. I live with an emotional core and a rational brain like a lot of other people. The centrists usually keep quiet though so I often forge ahead alone. Again, I have strong feelings on police shootings, racism, and even climate change! But, I worry that we will never have the tools to solve any of these problems if we live at the extremes of each conversation. If we’re only able to parrot the wittiness of a fellow content creator by sharing their story, instead of thinking for ourselves. What we want is in direct opposition with how algorithms work in the social universe. We’re trapped in a feedback loop where we must think extreme to evoke enough attention to get our thoughts heard. Rinse and repeat. The reality it seems is that less and less people are actually having conversations, and more and more people are just looking to be heard. It’s a frightening imbalance of impossible equity.
This is a thought on a hard day. I grieve with you. Talk soon.