There's a few lines from “I Love You, America” I want to ruminate on, as well as think about the adrenaline rush of panic I get at being chewed out by a police officer for unwittingly cutting out in front of him.
“People do the best with what they've been given.”
I know it's an old line and it didn't come from the show. It's said in service to try and better understand where someone who isn't behaving like you is coming from. I don't know reflexively that it's true, but I know it can provoke reflection as we're seeing unfold now.
I think of tools in this scenario as mental ones. Am I doing the best with what I've been given? The “best” for me is seemingly shifting in real time. Sometimes it really was too much to be working as often as I've chosen to take up again. I do have small and stupid goals along with the big ones that include my media pallet. I've come across hundreds of business ideas and tips and talks and still only manage to be as “far” as I am right now. There's a version of my story that's a sad lonely 29 year old who squandered college, broke too many ties, and has pipe-dream screamed himself into obscurity. Well, if I didn't have a living record of what was going through my head all this time, that is.
Sarah Silverman is one of those exceedingly genuine people. She's actually excited, she's actually trying to be honest and connect. People like her and Jeff Ross get away with what they do for the same reasons I do in social interactions. No matter the “worst thing ever said,” it's hard to think when they're there they actually hate you or want to see you harmed for something you've done or said. They're trying to parse out the difficult feelings through humor as earnestly as their targets are engaged with them via a vote for Trump. One is dramatically healthier and preferred, but what she's speaking to is important.
That consequential feeling level is alluded to all the time. I can't recall the number of times someone on a news program or someone in a heartfelt family-moment show or some lecturer references the idea that nobody is convinced by facts, they'll respond to how you make them feel. It's a forgone conclusion that, as far as the cultural conversation is concerned, facts are practically irrelevant, and I think ignoring that is why we're desperate now to admit they're significantly more relevant than we've been giving them credit for.
It's been my position for a fairly long time to not so much “dismiss” feelings, as attempt to engage them in a more explicit and exacting way. This also fails, because it doesn't feel good to do that. Things come to a head eventually where whomever is most full of feels wins. There is no “genius” behind this. It's the most puerile basic bitch thing we can do. But we insist on it, constantly.
The story of how to get to people is complex, but it's more complete than catering to feelings or being in perpetual attack mode. You need an environment that provokes the outcome you want. You need people with authority to be saying the same things. You need to teach the mental tools that can do the work of picking apart your decisions and identity without it feeling like threatening or exhausting work. I think it's well-meaning naivete to put a “typical Trump-supporting family” on TV to recite back untruthful propaganda, and then give them a hug because half said they don't care about gay marriage. There's more at stake than how we protect the veneer.
I think this speaks to the harshness with which I go about who I keep in my life or why. I can feel, viscerally, perpetually, the impact of interactions that in no way serve my conception of a healthy existence or definition of “friendship.” I've said you chase yourselves away, but I know when I've opened the gate. I've never wanted to be treated with kid gloves or given the fake hug. If you don't care about what I'm doing in life, don't read, and then especially don't read and then try to throw it my face how much you don't care lol. For me, that measure of “negative” or “honesty” or “realism” is life or death. The choice of which you're going to advocate for remains in flux, but you should figure out which way you trend. You should always make sure it still feels like a choice.
Let's change up a bit. I got pulled over. It doesn't happen every time, but occasionally some pullovers are dramatically more fear inducing than others. An adrenaline shot makes my hands shake. I'm thinking about how fucked I'll be financially if I get a ticket. Maybe, just this once, I'll be the white dude shot for reaching into the wrong part of my car. The last time I got pulled over, for swerving, I was so exhausted looking and feeling I had the officer apologizing to me for doing so. This time, he called me an asshole for absentmindedly pulling out in front of him.
I overwhelmingly am reassured by a police presence. They're not the enemy, and I'm sure, even by accident, it registered as an asshole driving move, just as I call a dozen people asshole too for what I see them do driving. Am I ever going to cut someone off again? It seems inevitable given what I'm doing for a living. Getting chewed out wasn't meant to harshly punish me, “fix” me ever doing it again, or make me hate cops. He used the line, “It isn't worth someone's life, or mine, to drive like that.” He thought, rightly so, that I needed a reminder that there's more at stake than where my head's at at the 12th hour.
Here I really want it to sink in what I'm doing. I wanted to understand the cop. I tied his experience in with my own. I responded to my formally trembling hands and adrenaline with a verbal breakdown seeking to understand how my own experiences of getting pulled over aren't universal in how they make me feel. I recognize that I pulled a shitty move. I'm thankful I wasn't ticketed.
I also want to understand comedians I admire, and Trump voters, and believe in the basic premises of togetherness, acceptance, and forgiveness. I just don't think we're going about it with the proper dose of “negativity” that elicits the groundswells we're getting now. It's why I've been pressed on more than one occasion to say Trump was what we “needed.” Not, of course, in the sense of actual need, but in that as long as we play by the rules of feelings over facts, what's scarier than the obliteration of everything you hold dear?
I can tell you it wasn't people sitting me down and holding my hand asking how I felt that got me to start writing. It was raw emotion. It was uncontrollable anxiety and anger. I started to choose to pick my words better. I started to focus in on the ideas that plagued me the most. I looked, and then looked again, at what the mirror was showing me and worked to accept what was going on like a receding hairline and graying sideburns. That lesson needs to show up more often than in self-help books or life-coaching seminars. You don't need a hug and to be falsely equivocated. You need to be shown how to do the work. You need to feel the negativity for what it is, your empathy has to bottom out, and then you need to use that as a provocation to act differently.
There's a bit of irony here too, because it's when I feel as helpless and small as I should probably feel all the time, I'm open to apologies. A former neo-Nazi challenged viewers to offer to someone your time and empathy who doesn’t deserve it, because it's precisely when someone did that for him that he started to change. I responded to the words “challenge” and “doesn't deserve.” I'm under the impression people often don't deserve shit, ever. I'm rarely challenged to do anything. But I also had a lingering problem floating in my head I wanted to resolve, at least on my end. So I offered an apology and don't expect anything in return or to come of it. He gave me a new turn on a way to think tool, and I did the best with it as I could, but I still had to choose to use it.
