When I was a kid, we had this little black and white TV that I got to have in my room — I was about 9 — that I was allowed to watch on Saturday mornings. My guess is that its purpose was a combination of peace and quiet for my parents and a place to store it. I’d watch cartoons, then drift into Gilligan’s Island. Life was definitely simpler (because I was a kid, and I didn’t read the paper apart from the funnies, and so I hadn’t yet heard about trickle-down economics).
The TV was old and this was a time where TVs had I think five or six channels, tops. Not all of the channels would actually have content, and so if you hand-cranked the dial to a channel that had no content, you got to see what we called “flyraces” — the black and white scatter screen with white noise, which in itself could be moderately entertaining if you were a bored kid and you decided you would try to “follow” a fly or two. When I was really imaginative, I’d try to predict, or even will, a given fly to go in a given direction. Keep in mind this was at a time where nearly every report card I got said, “Bobbie would do so much better in class if she just *applied* herself.” Bobbie was applying herself to flyraces.
Some decades later and the news and media input into this brain are… flyraces. Each and every little dot of black is a new attention-grabber and generally it’s not good. “If it bleeds, it leads” is true and there’s a lot of blood; even the most antiseptic, clinical assessment of things is depressing. The moderately entertaining flyraces of my sheltered youth have morphed into a cacophony of fear, hate, and what could only charitably be called idiocracy.
One is tempted to turn the TV off. After all, if you don’t read, or watch, then there’s nothing to depress you, right? A sheltered take – the only people who’d have the luxury of that are the ones who aren’t impacted by the various policies enacted. The parents trying to make their rent and pay their health insurance in a world where their transportation costs are skyrocketing (along with said health insurance) would not be comforted by not watching the news — the bills still come due. To look away is irresponsible; to continue watching is detrimental.
My current solution is scope – I am trying to pay attention to two to three flies, ones I can follow, and ones that I can (perhaps) do something about. The usual things – how one votes, where one’s money goes (for a vote with dollars is also a vote), where one puts one’s energy and time — apply here. I cannot track all the flies, so I try to choose which flies to follow and nudge. The cacophony of the other flies still abounds though; their visual impact still seeps through. Attempts to “scope it down” to just my flies often fail. I keep trying, though.
I am increasingly having difficulty with the differing opinions people have about living in a society. By definition, society is a collection of people living in some sort of organized pattern. I think the disparity of belief is in the next part that I take as a requirement of society: for the common good.
A basic reading of evolutionary genetics tells you that the chief principle of evolution is “fuck you, I’ve got mine”. As long as this gamete can use a zygote to make more gametes, game on. To make more progeny, at whatever cost, is what a “successful” evolutionary pattern wants: even if it costs the progenitor their life (mantis, octopus, etc.). Except that there is evidence for altruistic patterns wherein “fuck you, I’ve got mine” is NOT the way to go: that evolutionary altruism leads to the greater good for a given species… or society.
The tension here is what one considers “society”. Is society “my people” (so in terms of “fuck you, I’ve got mine”, is “mine” and “I” an assumed collection of like-minded individuals) or is society “the people” — ALL of the people. Not just the ones of your racial construct, or your religious affinity, or your immediate vicinity. There are some of the society that think of “mine”, and some of the society that think of “all”. And as long as we – the collective, larger we – differ in who we are talking about, we will continue to have these very big, very real, and very existential problems.
There are people who need to have a counterperson to compete against – the “yours” to the “mine”. They *need* to have “fuck you, I’ve got mine” because on some level in their head it makes things better — they cannot see benefit without seeing comparison. They need the “fuck you” part of the equation in order to operate. They are not scoping down to a couple of flies because they cannot keep up with all of them, they are scoping down to a couple of flies because they want their flies to be the only flies in the race. Therein lies the rub. As humans, we are limited in our ability to handle all of the things at once, and so must focus on a subset: how we choose to view the rest is the differential here. For some folks, the rest is “more to focus on once we get this part sorted”, and for some folks, the rest is to be fucked, for they’ve got theirs. Until we have a greater acceptance of the former, we will be stuck contending, cajoling, and combating with the latter.
Bobbie Conti 