I wrote this for my own personal Facebook feed, but I'm going to go ahead and share it here as well.
Take it as however you will.
My formative years were in the 1990s, and looking back at it, it was a very subtly remarkable time for us here. The Cold War had just ended, the economy was absolutely booming and there was this new thing called the Internet that seemed really cool and exciting. No, we weren’t completely enlightened on everything, but still, we seemed to be trending in the right direction.
That’s not to say the 90s were great for everyone worldwide—ask anyone living in the Balkans or in Rwanda, for example—but here at home, there was really nothing to bother us beyond our own personal internal angst, problems, and crises. Just to give you an idea of how things were, our two biggest news items of the time seemed to be 1) a celebrity murder trial and 2) a presidential affair. We actually fixated on those stories for months as *the* leading national news across the board. It’s amazing how much airtime those things got.
Then came the 2000s, and we had 9-11, and the Iraq War, and the Great Recession. Even still, those things seemed temporal, more or less like speed bumps as we continued to move forward. We elected a black President, and that ended up serving as a Rorschach Test of sorts, with two seemingly very distinct answers emerging.
I would say the time when things really began to change was about a dozen years ago. Maybe a little longer.
The first time I really noticed this darker air was after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. 26 schoolchildren and teachers had just been horrifically murdered. I turned on the news, and what did I see? Lines and lines of people outside of gun shops, all wanting to buy AR-15s, the same gun that the shooter used. People were “afraid” they wouldn’t be able buy them much longer. (Of course, those “fears” were never realized.)
I remember when Columbine happened in 1999 and it seemed unfathomable at the time. Now it’s just an annual to biannual occurrence.
What seemed to be happening was that the Internet started to become more than just merely a means of communication or a handy business tool, but rather the primary source for information.
And the biggest problem was that so many people had been conditioned to think that if someone was in print or something was broadcast, it automatically had credibility. They forgot that there still had to be an editorial process at work, fact checking and vetting, peer review, and that those things would not be a given in our new online era. If anything, they would become increasingly rarer and rarer.
So we got to a point where now you could just pull up on your phone whatever the first garbage it was you see on your Twitter or Facebook feed, repeat it to whoever happens to be sitting next to you as if it were the God’s honest truth, and never even get up off the couch. And suddenly, that was now our new era of information.
Disinformation flourished worldwide, and from that mass misinformation inevitably followed. Autocrats were elected. Autocracies flourished. Migrants and refugees were mocked and demonized for being the “other.” I saw my own ancestral homeland ripped apart by invasion and war. I saw ugliness and division paraded around as virtues and strength.
This continued unchecked for years, in our own country and beyond. Then 2020 happened, and people do seem to forget, but 2020 was actually a bad time. A very, very bad time. And here in the US it was just bad enough that just enough people—really a bare, slim majority of us—were able to momentarily stand up and pull the brakes, and recognize that this really was not who we wanted to become.
But then, we forgot. Or—even worse—maybe we just stopped caring.
After 2020, we thought maybe this was the end of the storm. But as it turns out, we were just in the eye of the hurricane, enjoying a momentary respite of wind until the other side of the storm came barreling through.
January 6th. A 34-count felony conviction. Civil judgments for fraud and even sexual assault. Things that in our prior era would be unthinkable and instantly disqualifying for anyone seeking a position of power. But either too many of us forgot, or too little of us kept caring.
We—our country, our nation—are broken and sick. True, really our whole world can also be described as broken and sick, but that’s always been pretty much a given. But this seismic shift change we’ve had over the past decade and a half has especially hurt us here at home.
And the silver lining is that broken things can get fixed. Sick people can get healed. But it’s got to take some effort, and God knows if we have that type of effort in us right now.
And for now, it appears, we just want it darker.
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