Silver Linings
I’ve noticed a slightly less onerous sense of impending doom lately as I read the local online news publication. And, no, it’s not because they reported that the maniacal Dark Lord and much of his sycophantic zombie entourage have contracted and spread COVID-19 amongst themselves through their own hubris and malfeasance in a gargantuan “Karma is a bitch,” moment.
It’s because I’ve noticed what I perceive to be subtle, hopeful changes in the local online publication and its sister newspaper the last few months. I’ve seen more articles about local effects of the climate crisis, a series of pieces dispelling the distortions and lies about voting coming from the El Presidente’ Dear Leader and comprehensive investigative reporting on the corruption of the Ohio Speaker of the House with regard to energy policy in our state. This is all encouraging to me.
And I’ve seen more truth telling by this local news outlet on things like racial injustice, social inequity and COVID-19 impacts on our less privileged and more vulnerable citizens. This emerging news trend suggests to me a budding social activism I’ve not seen in a long time from a publication that historically has devoted inordinate space to hometown passions like high school football, our local professional sports teams and, well, car ads.
They still do tend to pander to the seductive distractions that fascinate their parochially obsessed readership. They have argued that that’s their job actually: to give their readers what they are looking for, even if what many of their readers yearn for is quintessentially meaningless, I might add.
And they still give way too much op-ed space to more extreme rightwing bullies as far as I’m concerned. But they are in the business of selling the news to readers, not saving the human race, so I guess I get it, even if their rapt attention to the trivial and giving a soapbox to hate-filled miscreants infuriate me.
But more consistently calling out the reality of how messed up things are right now here in the U.S and on the globe is just being responsible. As such, the indefatigable optimist in me is always finding silver linings, and so I’m cautiously and mildly heartened by what appears to be their taking their journalistic role on issues of social equity a little more seriously. It gives me some hope because if this publication is speaking out, even cautiously, maybe that’s reflecting a social activism its readers are starting to embody more and more.
Because in the grand scheme of things, COVID-19, as horrible as it has been and will continue to be, is really the least of our really big worries. Two years from now, a vaccine will have been successfully deployed and the devastation of COVID-19 will have begun to be a thing of the past. If history were the judge, we’ll likely be moving on to the next obsession with big shiny yet breathtakingly unimportant objects, and the human suffering from COVID illness, death and economic calamity will be fading into a thing of the past.
But I sense a seismic shift occurring. I sense that we will have rid ourselves of the proximate idiots who let this tragedy occur, and I sense we’ll be attacking the bigger calamities that threaten our society, in a big way.
I sense that more and more people grasp ever more anxiously that we have just lost our way as humans, especially in this country. People are just plain fed up and are acting out. They’ve understood for some time how messed up things have become; how out of whack our priorities have been, and now they’re putting themselves out there and on the line to help fix stuff because no one has for maybe the last 50 years, and they’ve just had enough. As the saying goes, they’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
If you doubt that premise, just look at what’s going on with early voting right now. It is AWESOME.
People totally get that We the People have the Power to make things change, and that’s what they’re going to do. I’m particularly excited by the degree to which professional athletes (especially in the NBA and NFL) and performing artists are making their voices heard. They move people emotionally, and they move them to ACTION. Colin Kaepernick was simply a visionary ahead of his time that was vilified and discriminated against by the NFL owners and our racist President. He deserves a job now and back pay, that’s for sure! LeBron James continues to step up routinely in wonderfully community-centered ways.
I think people are also getting far more discerning about their priorities. Right now, it’s getting harder to prioritize anything that doesn’t involve the closeness of relationships with family and friends. For many people the only priorities that make any sense at all are putting food on the table, finding a job and not getting sick with this damnable virus.
Our universal problems also seem so overwhelming, and there is just so much energy and resources to go around, so people are prioritizing more of their energy and resources to things that threaten their family and friends, and to things that preferentially cause the suffering of the most vulnerable in society.
The list of huge nasties has just gotten bigger and more imposing with time. COVID-19 is the most recent addition, and it’s been an important wake up call. The list includes the climate crisis, systemic racism, racial violence, white supremacy, income and wealth inequality and our insanely corrupt political system in the U.S., among other things. We the People now know that to start to fix these and other monumental injustices, they personally need to get involved, because our leaders have so monumentally dropped the ball.
I also think people get the idea that they can blissfully relax and recreate comfortably only after the work is done. And as a society, we’ve spent a little too much energy and resources on the recreation and pursuit of creature comforts and not enough of our prioritized focus on the work. The work is getting after the big ugly problems in a big way, and because our leaders have deftly ignored these existential threats for decades, We the People now need to take the reins and do more of the work ourselves and hold our leaders more accountable, before we can reward ourselves with the recreation.
So, I sense that the seductive distractions may take a bit of a back seat for a while until We the People feel comfortable that the proper amount of energy and resources are being devoted to issues that matter, issues that are essential. And the local news may devote a little less space to local passions, or reality TV or how wonderfully the stock market is performing for the minority of people that invest in it.
And if so, that will almost certainly mean that their attention will have shifted, as their readers has, to things that really are critical. And that will be a very good thing, indeed.
(Original art by J.E. Hargate.)
