ECHO EcHo Echo echo....

I've solved nothing

Anyone who knows me well would probably tell you that I don’t wander into the wasteland of politics very often. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start now. I have a hard time trusting anyone who is asking to be put in power. Begging, really. However, the borders of what I felt I once knew as “politics” seem to be getting blurrier all the time. I generally (and apparently naively) associate politics with politicians or policy, as opposed to day to day life choices such as where I grocery shop or generally held assumptions like “I want clean drinking water.” In our current landscape though, I feel even basic human survival needs have a tendency to be treated politically.

Blame whatever or whoever you want for this, but I tend to cast a suspicious eye towards the undying echo chamber each of us is served minute by minute by our handheld advertising/surveillance devices that we are all but required to carry around with us just to navigate modern society. I am by no means above this. I’m writing this very essay on a website, for instance. I check my tour schedule on my phone and I got a ride to our hotel last night from it, too. I might even follow you on social media. I would dust off the old typewriter and send this to you by mail, but then I’d have to listen to complaints of me wasting paper.

The funny thing about all this is that nobody seems to like it. Now, it’s possible that this opinion is a result of my own particular echo chamber, but seemingly everyone I talk to about phones, social media, the rampant politicizing of anything within eyesight etc., seems to be overly tired, if not fully disgusted, by the entire situation. We act as if we are being pulled by a riptide out into a dark ocean with no hope of escaping; like none of this is under our control. It’s a sad state of affairs, indeed. I could almost understand it better if there was a segment of our population I found with my own two ears that absolutely loved life attached to an iPhone and passionately counted the days until the next election cycle. I know you’re out there. You must be, or why would this landscape be our landscape?

The rantings of a crabby old man, I know. My kids, sans fully developed frontal cortexes as they are, love our technology. They are not Luddites, as I often wish I was. They don’t know any different, and when I talk to them (often) about the dangers of social media, losing the ability to think for themselves, or gaining the ability to remember directions home from the mall, I’m pretty sure all they hear is raspy tales of me walking five miles through a blizzard to get to school because my horse gave out (uphill both ways, of course). I might as well be out back shaking my fist at a cloud. Stupid cloud.

The generations before mine thought I was crazy when I was 13 as well. Video games and MTV. Sounds innocent and harmless now, but to our parents that stuff was surely a sign of the end times. I try to remind myself that all generations eventually think the next is weak and doomed. Obviously there are new dangers and benefits of each new round, and each new generation has to figure out how to navigate them with little help from their elders, as the pace of change is swift. When my great-grandmother Jessie was born in 1904, she traveled in a horse-drawn wagon. When she died in 2003, I was editing our band’s first Myspace page.

What I worry about most in the current state of technology is our inability to agree on a shared reality. If I do most of my shopping, communicating, and news-ingesting online, which I admittedly do, then quickly my experience becomes ultra-curated by the all-mighty algorithm to only include items that I would likely buy, social media accounts of people I would likely follow, and news with which I would likely agree. I bet a lot of you have had the experience of talking about a product and then seeing ads for that product the next time you checked your phone. Why that isn’t enough to throw them all in a bottomless pit, I have no idea. If each of us is given a reality specifically tailored to our own tastes and beliefs, how could we possibly understand people that feel differently? I mean they would be crazy, wouldn’t they? How many times have you been in a room with friends and someone says something about a politician and the conversations moves forward without the slightest inkling that someone at the table might feel differently than the speaker? Because of our echo chambers, we tend to believe that if we like someone, the two of us must, of course, be politically aligned. Those people wouldn’t hang out in this restaurant! Those people wouldn’t like this band! Those people are different than us! Those people!

We are constantly bombarded with information showing us that those who believe differently than we do about government (or medicine, or education, or electric cars or whatever) are somehow not only wrong, but evil. And we are not talking about Monarchists vs. Anarchists, here. We are usually talking about different opinions on specific parts of Representative Democracy: taxes, foreign policy, and the like. Important parts of a society, no doubt, but these differences would ideally be argued about over pints at the pub after work, with the end result being shared respect and maybe even a new perspective. However, these differences in opinion are now often grounds for ending friendships, marriages, and in some circles, even civil war. Or at least the puffing of chests about civil war. Politicians’ use of over-simplified ides of good and evil is nothing new, of course, but one would think with the ability to learn anything in the whole history of the world sitting right there on the coffee table in the form of a smartphone, we would somehow have become intelligent enough not to fall for it anymore.

But we don’t usually use those infinite little blue-lighted boxes for becoming more intelligent, do we? We use them to look at funny videos or to see pictures of out of reach vacations or to facelessly leave negative reviews about a restaurant, or to scream into a long dark tunnel of agreement about whatever controversy we’ve been fed that particular day by the other end of the tunnel.

We are all so insulated in our little bubbles of relative reality, that outside of travel, we can go a very long time without running into anyone from outside our fairly small slice of income level and political leaning. I don’t think that people hanging out within their economic class is new either, but what is fairly new is the constant flow of information showing us that our particular situation is not enough. People are so focused on worshiping the wealthy and trying to find ways to join them, that often even someone that lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood with cupboards overflowing with food can feel like they are financially struggling, like they still have so far to go. Sometimes they’ll even blame people who are living in actual poverty, of which we have plenty, who are simply trying to survive another day. It seems the only thing we like better than being voyeurs to the wealthy is watching a house of cards collapse when someone’s wealth turns out to be phony. They’re not so special after all! What a strange relationship.

A presidential election is coming up. Have you ever seen a sillier display of braggadocio or a greater lack of humility and focus than a presidential election? We in the US are absolutely lucky to have them as often as we do. Ask anyone who’s locked into a dictatorship and I’m sure they’d love the chance to change the oil in the machine every four years. Many of us have our core issues about which we cast our votes. Many of us cast our votes for a political party no matter who the person is they’ve set out in front of us. Nobody is allowed to tell you how to go about it, that’s for sure. If you’ll allow me something else, though, I would love to suggest attempting at least one reach out of the echo chamber this fall. I don’t mean taking a peak at an Instagram account or reading some headlines from a press outlet you usually avoid. That will just make you angry. I mean talk with someone who may be voting differently than you. But, and here’s the rub, don’t talk about politics! Talk about raising kids or baseball or hunting or wine or music or whatever you may possibly have in common. Common ground allows us to see each other not as good or bad, not as right or left, but just as humans, often with similar concerns and joys and challenges. More than likely you aren’t going to change your vote and neither are they, but at least you won’t be mortal enemies about it. People are not supposed to all feel the same way. How boring would we be if that were not true? A bunch of grey, faceless humanoids who all like the same songs and see the world from exactly the same perspective. No, Dave, WE don’t like cheeseburgers now. Humans are just animals. We are bound to have differences. Where we come together is where our government should ideally exist, instead of now when they just seem to poke at us until people snap. We can’t let our bubbles become permanent, made of cement. Distraction is such a powerful tool, especially in the coming months.

What cynicism! I can’t help it, friends. I see my kids in middle school navigating an already wild time of life with the entire weight of the internet within arm’s reach. I see adults unwilling to talk about anything with people from across the aisle simply because their chosen news outlet has decided to make the other side out to be devils. I see people believing that there are only two sides to the aisle! Candidates are so worried that the rest of us will find so little to like about them, they make every election (at least every one for which I’ve been around) into some kind of moral battle between good and evil. “Even if you don’t like me, we can’t let the other person win or else the whole country will collapse!” “Don’t you dare vote for anyone outside of the two major parties or you’re pretty much voting for evil to rule over us all!” Obviously this is well researched and works, or else it wouldn’t be happening.

I am excited to see your comments coming in labeling me a socialist or a libertarian, depending on which one your algorithm says is bad. I know all anyone has to do is say the word “politics” and the dam can break loose. I don’t blame you, it’s triggering. In the end, I reluctantly find that I do have a lot of faith in our species. We’ve been through a lot, but we really haven’t been here all that long. As John McFee offered in his book, Basin and Range (which I have yet to finish but I love this quote) “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.” Maybe when that nail grows a little longer we will finally figure out how to occupy this world together. Maybe not, but it’s worth a try.