Watch the news today and notice what happens:
There will be a shooting.
Someone will die.
There will be a national disaster.
A terrorist will strike.
Tragedy will befall someone.
And in a matter of seconds, we will all fall over ourselves trying to quickly fashion the moment into a social media weapon, in order to remind the watching world that this is what we’ve been talking about—this is our justification and vindication. Another person’s misery will become the soapbox we all quickly stand upon to preach about the rightness of our cause.
That someone may be dead or on the operating table or left homeless is immaterial.
The facts and the details and the specifics are inconsequential.
The complex truth is of little importance.
Nuance and subtlety and grayness are irrelevant.
The consequences of our commentary are microscopic afterthoughts.
They all yield to our urgent and pressing need to immediately rub someone’s noses in it.
It’s a non-partisan, fully inclusive national sickness afflicting each of us. In our quest to feel relevant we’ve succumbed to a knee-jerk, hair-trigger moralizing fueled primarily by our biases and agendas. We’ve all found ourselves there. At times we’ve all sacrificed decency on the altar of immediacy; more concerned with flipping off our adversaries than being an actual help.
And the result of it all is that our collective goodness and our shared humanity are being eroded—one shitty hot take at a time.
There is a difference between believing, “I have something I need to say,” and “I need to have something to say.”
One describes a desire to speak into a situation because of a personal burden on the matter at hand—the other denotes a compulsion to be visible, to feel important regardless. The former represents a passionate, informed perspective that longs to be heard, while the latter is a desperate plea to be noticed. Today may be a good day to ask yourself what drives you, what moves you—why you do what you.
One of the most difficult challenges of living this social media-saturated existence, is knowing when we’re genuinely participating in bringing justice and when we’re being destructive—when we’re being activists and when we’re just being a**holes. I lose this battle hourly.
I’m not sure we can recover all that we’ve lost. The pull toward instant ego gratification may forever be stronger than our desire for quiet, thorough, measured understanding of difficult and complex issues. The competitive drive to beat the world to the punch as it moves ever faster, may leave us more and more reckless, more and more callous, less and less careful with our words.
But I’m going to try today. I’m going to breathe and step back from the buzzing, flashing, disorienting fray in order to make sure I find decency there in the quiet. I’ll endeavor to dig deep enough and wait long enough, in the hopes that when I do finally speak, it will be something redemptive, something worthy, something helpful.
And whether or not it moves the needle, or even if it’s particularly hot—that’s a take I can live with.
