The soulless armchair quarterbacks are at it again. At a time when we should be opening our hearts and questioning who we are becoming as a society, the meme merchants and soulless pundits are on the ball, seeking to drive even more wedges into our fractured society.
It’s not that America hasn’t been fractured for decades. Democracy is messy stuff. We all seem to have a pair of dice with no pips etched in them. Yes, that’s what the dots are actually called, pips.
Every time something happens in this country, we roll the dice and come up with some crazy combinations.
As we all know, a tremendous tragedy happened last Saturday night in Orlando. Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, children and parents died at the hands of a terrorist.
Rather than grieve or even offer our condolences, those with an agenda have wasted no time in pushing those agendas off on us. There are the pro-gun folks and the anti-gun factions, the Islamaphobes, homophobes and the Bible beaters. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a cause for what is nothing more than a tragedy and violent act against humanity.
Yet, rather than all come together as one, we suck up the pablum of the media and special interest groups, of the politicians seeking our votes, and of the 1% who seek to divide us.
And we seem to suck it up so willingly. On Facebook, the posts go on and on. I’m not going to dignify any of them here. And I’m not going to give you some pop culture analysis of what was the cause of this latest act of violence in our society.
I will say, however, that we must begin to question who we are as citizens of this great land. Each of these acts of violence seems to be bigger and more horrific than the last. Our hearts bled as small children were shot down in Sandy Hook. We all looked for the exits when we first returned to the movie theater after that shooting. And now 49 are dead and countless wounded at an Orlando nightclub.
Why? I’m not sure we will ever know. Yes, there will be the inevitable ties to extremists in the Middle East somewhere. We will hear from his ex-wife or girlfriend. We will hear from co-workers who never trusted him. We will try to slap labels on him and his cause because it’s easier than doing any real soul searching.
We will share sound bites and memes: Get rid of the guns. Make it harder to buy guns. Put more money into mental health treatments. Ban Muslims. Build a wall.
Yes, the easy answers. We love easy. Because the hard answers take too much work, and worse, it requires us to look at ourselves individually and our society as a whole Tough stuff, like coming to grips with our own lack of civility or humanity. Our lack of compassion and empathy. Our readiness to turn away from someone in need rather than spend a minute or two to be of service.
We are becoming a nation of silos. We don’t need a wall because we’re already building them ourselves. We ignore the homeless man on the street. We don’t wave back at our neighbors. We flip the guy off next to us for cutting us off. We have a complete meltdown because our fast food order was wrong. We short the overworked waitress because she forgot to bring us a spoon. The list goes on and on…
We are becoming a nation of Me’s, not We’s.
We live increasingly in fear of our own shadows. We look upon others with suspect rather than curiosity. We blame everyone else for our problems but never ourselves. We complain about the world as being too PC when really, we just want to justify our own ethnocentrisms and racist leanings because it’s easier to that than change.
And the 1% is laughing all the way to the bank. For as long as we turn on each other, we can’t turn on them.
I sometimes think that smartphones were created by the 1% to keep us at bay. I see it all the time. Young and old alike, buried in their screens, oblivious to the world around them, consumed by the false world they created inside that little box.
There, they can find solace. They can friend others who have the same beliefs and unfriend those who don’t share their limited views of the world. They can be politically incorrect. They can sink into a soulless world that agrees with them completely, no matter how whacked their world really is.
And we wonder why people commit such atrocious acts. It’s so easy to do when you’ve lost your own humanity as well as compassion, empathy and love. Somewhere along the way, something goes horribly wrong. These people lose all hope. They lose touch with reality. Their hearts fill with hate instead. And once that happens, violence against others simply becomes an extension of the hate they have for who they are and who they have become. They have nothing to lose, so they act out in their hatred.
Again, I’m not trying to serve up solutions from the cheap seats. I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I can see some basic truths.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we just rejected all the pablum being served up by politicians, the media and organizations who have something to gain by keeping us divided. I can’t help but think that if we just reached out to one another instead of distancing ourselves further in these moments of trial and tribulation, that we could find away to stay a “united” states instead of a “divided” states.
Only time will tell. I for one plan to practice acts of civility more mindfully going forward. I have never had anyone lash out at me because I was too kind, thoughtful or respectful. In fact, I have experienced just the opposite. It’s not the answer, but a start. And while I can’t change the world, I can change how I interact with it and how I respond to it.
In the Emerald City, thinking about my own role in this wonderful republic of ours,
- Robb