[549] The little Things

A lot of time is spent extolling the virtue and utility of “the little things.” It could be a returned wallet. It could be a smile and wave to the person looking sad. Every few months there’s a video of someone handing out gifts to the homeless or a tale of someone in a tight spot goes viral because people rallied together to help them. The story goes that as long as we are able to identify and draw inspiration from these things we can’t be all bad. In fact, things are “basically good” despite the excuses that try to explain away those who don’t return the wallet, are homeless, or why they ended up needing attention and crowd sourcing. It’s a celebration of personal hardship or charity that society glombs onto to carry on classic conceptions of virtue.

I’ve shaken off my regard for the little things. Particularly in the age of the internet, it’s easy to get lost in saintly videos as often as you choose to run from any guilt about not appearing in your own. With donate buttons we think of ourselves as trickling in streams of goodness that contribute to an overall whole we can be proud of. We think we’re setting an example. We think we’re making a difference. The hallmark statement of this idea is, “If I can only reach just one person then I’ll know my work made a difference.” Of course, the business of protecting and promoting the idea makes sure to indeed find that one person to keep testifying to all the difference you made.

We’re running right up against the problem with it now though. We elected Hitler 2. We chose fascism. Our moral center is orange and racist and, if only ignorant, were it not a pathological liar. Ten seconds on your facebook and you’ll see sad faces, smug memes, typically ridiculous arguments, more fingers pointed than hands to house them, consoling music videos, somber poetry, and everything that comes along with being in shock. People express how much they love you if you’re being targeted. They’re rallying in the streets. They’re hashtag campaigning. They’re searching for every inch of hope and even conspiracy to assuage the fear that it’s not as bad as it looks.

What you don’t see is people identifying the hard moral failings that amount to any kind of proactive accountability or truth. They can’t disavow love; the myth will carry them through. They can’t voice the word fascism because, how would we get WWII if the Germans had Netflix!? Things are different, you reactionary! They know nothing of how charity works or how the money is spent or why the government got so disengaged that it’s charity’s burden to pick up the slack. They don their own empty professions of the real revolution because it takes something as bad as mortal fear to provoke action at all, let alone hints at action that matters.

It’s a swirling steaming pile of the little things. It’s scattered and scraggly Occupy camps running ritual snapping and yelling games to help appease their nerves. I would argue it’s not even in good faith. These people flock from their conservative origins, for good reason, not because they wanted to engage and transform the landscape, but because they wanted to pursue their story in a place where they’d mostly be left alone to do so. They retreated to a cutthroat world of selfishness and celebrity and donned the pretentious and condescending armor needed to survive. They adopted the words “struggle” and “hustle” like the road to Youtube or tech start-up stardom amounts to more than waste and privilege. They thought they could escape to the beauty of the mountains or the sea and put away all complicated communal concerns.

There’s a frequented theme in arguments online regarding condescension. It’s an attitude I’m certainly sensitive to. It’s often the first line of defense if someone fashions themselves as old and wise or part of the “real society” that sees their contribution and raises you their finger. Ultimately though, when one opts to dive behind the walls of condescension they predicate it on a presumed knowledge. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is the tool they use to smash your pathetic attempt to use your voice in a way they don’t agree with or understand. We must be careful here not to assume it is de facto correct knowledge. We must make pains to distinguish “personal truths” when trying to ascertain knowledge. Knowledge in this instance acts like a smokescreen for power. It’s a swing for the fences that, in its mind, knocks you out the park the moment it’s employed.

We can make the analogy a little easier though; it tries to be the gun in the knife fight. The thing about guns is that they don’t usually come preloaded. If we react to the gun’s very presence and shut up or run away, you win. If we call your bluff with our own gun, we lay the foundation of a situation that plays out in a complicated way. That is, if you actually have knowledge and things pop off, it’s maybe a spray of bullets they aren’t going to come up from. It’s maybe a standoff where you trade smack talk and both leave alive and unsatisfied. Or maybe you both get shots in and limp away to address your wounds because, damn, that shit was loaded.

Of course you never have to shoot someone. You don’t have to raise the stakes by leading with often deliberate misunderstanding and overreaction, but how often does it go differently? How often are you allowed to make your point, have it acknowledged, and be offered a counter or subverting idea and given the time to consider it? I know I’m often accused of being the first one to pull my gun. I don’t just start shooting though. I ask why you don’t recognize it’s a water gun. We’re talking patience and etiquette dynamics. Why does it seem so easy to analogize interpersonal relationships and conversation with weaponry in the first place?

And then those questions become the most disarming thing. Because with one turn of phrase you realize the other person is speaking your language. The problems even finding that first page together, I guesstimate erases 90%+ of the positive potential for conversation. It’s much easier to unfriend. It’s much easier to block and down vote. There’s an emotional reward for curtailing your view of the world into a box of likes and frequent searches. You’re willing to indulge and positively remember your own virtue than believe in someone else’s.

They say the little things add up, but no one is doing the math. Maybe you’re marching for civil rights so you dress nice so they can’t call you thugs. You stay peaceful so your aggressors get painted as such. And then what? You get a bill that’s politically expedient. You didn’t change their minds about you. You’re still in danger. You get to watch parts of that bill get rescinded. You get to watch white people invent all sorts of new ways to keep you out of the process. They got to keep doing big things. They determined the long term consequences. The story gets rosier or blood red depending on what type of scale you’d like to measure.

Let’s state it another way. You may no longer be slaves, but humanity has not disavowed slavery. You may not use the word slave to describe your station in life, but if you didn’t maintain it, for most “working class” Americans, there’d be nothing but pain or death. Your simple pleasures and escapes, your faith, your fandom, your indulgences, your retreats, your inscrutable love, none speak towards changing your status. Enough little things certainly do add up, but it’s only to placate your little mind in your little world. It’s the ethics of the slave. You can’t escape so you turn servitude into virtue. You make sacrifice your God. It makes sense; it is survival, if nothing else.

You don’t know the language or the form of Big Things. You don’t know Big Brother peaking over your shoulder. You don’t know Big Business and what it’s interested in. You hand over complicated questions about your direction or morals to Big Religion (although increasingly less so) because you’re learning how to incorporate its big ignorance and assurances onto your little list of self-satisfaction. Big History cares not about Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc. Big Academia will retain the paper from which you should assert your knowledge and worth. Big Paper Money will tell YOU what it’s worth, not the other way around.

You buy in. You make celebrities not just lucky and talented bars to clear, but larger than life Gods to emulate. You transfer the power of your intention and intrigue into what they eat and wear. You follow follow follow follow, like like like like like until what’s left of you is a brief reflection from a screen before your device powers on. You can’t slow down because it’s always updating. You can’t stop to think or you’ll be out of the loop. You can’t learn to engage with it another way because you can’t recognize invitations to and someone in Silicon Valley is designing an app to make sure if you don’t like to read and even Spark Notes is too much for you, the gist of Pride and Prejudice will one day enhance your life in the time it takes to drink your morning cup of fair trade coffee.

You think it will go on and on indefinitely like your online world goes on and on indefinitely. That’s the saga of “infinite growth” when we discuss unfettered capitalist economies. It’s the short-term memory that celebrates greed and mocks the memory and pain of pursing forgiveness. It’s the insecure lashing out at the idea of being challenged or wrong because your bubble is equal to my bubble, let’s put the pins away. It’s superficiality now so normalized the institutional memory of moral truths and deep relationships lay amidst the barren bones of dating profiles. Lost little selves playing in the sprinkler of our abductor’s lawn.

As long as you’re willing to acknowledge your place and go down dancing, I have less of a problem with you. When you start to pretend your little mind with its little ideas and little selfish pursuits speak towards genuine change and care, I’m happy to argue until my head pops. When you think you’re doing a Big Boy job that rests the weight of his fellow man on his shoulders and it’s them, those disgusting others who don’t get it to the point you’re unable to see your shared language and circumstances, I’ll drive a car right through that dispositional living room.

The first step to potential progress is self-imposed guilt. It’s sadness about all you do not yet know. It’s feeling every second of time you’re not speaking to something larger than yourself. It’s blaming yourself for your fascist nature, your lazy complicit lives, and your fearful emboldened ignorance. Then you get to start seeing how it’s affecting others. Then you get the silver bullets in your gun. The alternative is to remain as small and selfish as your martyred idols. They died for a truth you felt and you think you heard, but never found out how to discover yourself. They rose to the level of a Big Deal as far as your little mind could conceive of it.

Power is fluid. If you’re not paying attention you won’t notice until you’re drowning. Your idols are not powerful. Your love is not powerful. Your God is not powerful. Your words without defense and understanding are not powerful. Your protests are not powerful. Your personal truth is not powerful. Power cares not about your opinion. Power cares nothing for your intentions. Power has no morality. Power is something to be recognized. Power is something to be shaped. The exercise of the mind attempting to do so has to come before. The honesty and humility it takes to house and transfer power need to be found in their own right. The ways we’re choosing to go about this election reminds me time and again that you have none.