Society Questions

Were so many people always this ignorant and heartless?  Or is it just amplified by social media?

Many things triggered this question in my head the other morning, the end of the week during which 18 people were murdered in yet another school shooting; but the specific headline that got my attention was something about angry tweets directed at Lindsay Vaughn for not winning a gold medal in the olympics that day.

W T F ?!

Is all this ignorant negativity a new and growing thing? Is it Russian interference in our societal norms?  Is it because we have a rude, ignorant, heartless president?  Or are we just seeing this negativity more because it gets reported more in the news and spread more rapidly via social media?

And here I am spreading negativity too, by saying what I’m saying in this blog today?. Ugh. Next post will be more positive.

Then there’s the gun nuts dissing the protesting high school students. Rude. There are valid points if view on all sides of the gun issue, but no need for ridiculing grieving high school students who lived through and survived a senseless mass shooting. Sometimes 17-year-olds are wiser than boomers. Protesting boomers who were in high school and college at the time of their/our protests changed the world in largely positive ways. Maybe it’s happening again.

I’ve said this many times in this blog: nobody has all the answers to the difficult questions we face today. I often laugh, cry and scream simultaneously at the arguments some people make on tv and social media. Example: the jerk we’re supposed to call president rallies his vocal supporters against ‘chain migration’ when his own wife benefited from that exact practice.

Somebody please remind everybody that we are a nation of immigrants. Somebody please remember that our nation was founded on finding common ground in conflicting opinions.

I accept that some people at the ideological fringes of society have beliefs that are repulsive to me. They have the right to hold those beliefs and those ideas are fine if they don’t dominate the culture and don’t become the norm. I can’t accept that our alleged leader recklessly pushes some of those those same beliefs.

There is plenty of 50-year nostalgia this year about 1968. That was a scary and pivotal year. Assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy; race riots, anti Vietnam war protests, many on college campuses. Ideological clashes between generations dominated the society conversation. It felt like the country was coming apart at the seams. The parallels between 1968 and 2018 are scary. We survived 1968. But the debates of 2018 are not only on tv like back then, but also on thousands of social media outlets. The nightly news coverage on three networks and a few dozen print outlets has been eclipsed by ‘opinion-as-fact’ on thousands of outlets in the palms of our hands.  Separation of fake from real, myth from reality, opinion from fact is harder than ever to discern and in our short attention span society we have less time and interest in intelligent separation of those contradictory positions.

These are important questions with complex answers. My question: how will we survive this?