[1185] Match Game

Standard disclaimer, I sense there will be acutely disparate threads I'm attempting to weave together.

LeVar Burton exercises a certain kind of wisdom I wish I saw more of. On some of his stories he will include in his preface that there's a content warning in the episode description, "If you're so inclined to read it." He's a sympathetic person who you gather gets a sense of what his characters have represented to people. Even if he's intimately familiar with the kind of life experiences that might harden his shell and deride the idea that we should be coddling each other, he's not dismissive of his potential emotional impact. He's not going to decry "trigger warning!" and virtue signal, he's allowing you to treat yourself as you wish to be treated. He invites you to use your own time to dig up and decide if a short story is going to overwhelm you. It's subtle and thoughtful without capitulating.

A lot of comedians have the same conversation about whether or not "woke" made it impossible to perform. The landscape is always evolving, yet somehow famous comedians stayed famous, employed, and navigated. Ones that might have had to be more subtle and thoughtful in their jokes adjusted and thrived. Those who wanted to beat lazy cliches into ignorant sounding bad jokes cried the loudest. That isn't to say audiences couldn't be blamed for drifting too far into "righteously offended" territory, but it did mean here was again an opportunity to have a nuanced conversation, and either/or drove a hyperbolic discussion into the ground. Somehow, the most "anti-woke" comedians became literal fascist apologists.

Now, we're seemingly culturally viscerally reacting to "DEI." As if, by themselves, the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are anathema to a thriving country. Why? Those who were championing the effort refused to be nuanced and wise. They refused the lessons of the giants whose shoulders they professed to stand upon. When you do that, you cede the ground to the crazies. You foment grievances that piddling-middle types sympathize with because there's an incredibly compelling grain of truth wedged directly in their eye. I want a diverse community. I don't want people to be given things they don't deserve or haven't worked for. These ideas aren't at odds with each other in most reasonable people's heads. Institutions have biases and some are particularly corrupt. Every system and institution are not the same. 

This morning I went to breakfast. I work in the Indianapolis area, and every time I go into Sunshine Breakfast, I'm greeted in Spanish. The first 2 times the waitresses gathered I don't speak Spanish (at least not conversationally) and I was able to order without issue. Today, my waitress didn't seem to understand nearly anything I said, and after several extra minutes and assistance from another one, I eventually got my order in and correctly delivered. My first thought was that were I to open a French restaurant in France is that I'd be sure to know the language well enough to take orders.

How do you read that story? As an opportunity to engage on some racist tirade? Are you immediately thinking all sorts of things about my "questionable" instincts? Is it merely confirmation of all the hateful things you'd lump together associated with Trump's rhetoric about immigration? Was it just a mild inconvenience you think I'm foolish for even bothering to bring up? There's a fog. I want it to be simple, but as I discovered, even something that was simple twice, and why I keep returning, wasn't so much the third time. 

You can't build "wisdom" around a floor that's always moving. You can't share values that increasingly only exist between you and whatever your phone is showing you. 

I think, for example, that if you're going to bother to build rules and policy, you should make a good faith effort to follow those rules and policies. We now live in a country where that whole concept is functionally mute. Violently attack police and attempt to overthrow the government? Only "partisans" would care to pursue you in their unfair judgment of your morals merely vying to stop the steal. These kinds of signals trickle down into how, or whether you can at all, set expectations everywhere else.

I'm an adult in the room in my oversight of children every day. Why should they listen to me? There's the classics of, "Because I said so," or "Because I'm the adult," which on their face, are mindless attestations of power. Those rely on both the child's ignorance and the implicit violence I could inflict to force the issue. As is the cultural moment's habit, let's say it's because I'm interested in keeping them "safe." Safe became the new metric for an ever-illusive means of controlling behavior and narratives. How often we belabored the "harm" one might experience innocently discovering LeVar is still reading, and being shocked by the themes or language. 

Why we used to listen to anyone was because it was, in fact, keeping us safe. We listened to the elders who survived the precarity of existence and learned a thing or two. We listened to the experts who figured out ways to capitalize and heal. We listened to the writers of myths and journeys with embedded values which tied directly into our ability to survive. Now? The information landscape is so fluid it's psychologically impossible to ground yourself without an innate intelligence, practice, conscious recognition of the ways it's moving through you. The way my mind works, I wouldn't have a prayer of maintaining my values or see ways through the weeds without writing. I go out of my way to stay awash in media, and the disorientation occurs regularly. 

One form this takes is in the whiplash from listening to something like Pod Save America, and then the next episode be Honestly with Bari Weiss. Both kind of annoy me, which helps me stay reflective and critical of what they're saying, and who they're choosing to talk about things with. I feel the Bari crowd simping for religion and MAGA and can feel the permanent smirk they have by successfully persuading at least a million subscribers that they're the new "middle." I feel adrift and nearly drowning listening to Pod Save America reiterate everything that hasn't worked and ruminate on how impossible it feels to coalition build, message, or find remote joy in so much ongoing destruction. 

If I were to just draw from memory what I agreed with from both podcasts, I don't think it would paint me as a radical. 

Democrats are hypocrites when it comes to "money in politics."
Democrats need to be messaging constantly across every medium that will have them, but also be able to credibly speak to the work they're actually doing for the working class.
The conversation around trans issues went off the rails before anyone actually studying things was consulted. It's both okay to acknowledge biology and sex differences and make room to help those with dysphoria or who choose to express their gender differently.
I want a country with strong borders that concerns itself with protecting western values.
I want the people working and living in the country to be able to get citizenship. I think so much of the discussion about the "rule of law" is garbage, pageantry, and disgraceful when you put a convicted felon rapist at the top of the pyramid.
I don't know if I've heard 2 honest conversations about the greed and monopolistic capture that informs prices.
Privacy is important.
Social media shouldn't be given endless power to do whatever they want with our data.
Hating each other isn't going to solve anything, but many people are openly espousing and washing the laundry of the most hateful ideas we've ever popularized.
Your average person isn't sophisticated, nuanced, or remotely interested in their well-being like a proverbial "informed citizen" of a democratic ideal. 

We're dumb animals first, and there's a reason the propaganda works. I've been looking for refuge in this idea for weeks. I keep reminding myself that, even this language right now, is lip gloss on a screaming ape species only not flinging its shit because it's eating to reload. 

While writing this, I got an email from my boss, somewhat retaliatory, somewhat signaling "concern," about my approach to a child that is not appropriate for our program. I say that given their written policy standards, not because I just don't like kids or this one in particular. I've bent over backwards for weeks attempting to not only assess his behavior, but the staff's responses, and the ability to follow a "behavior plan" that's allegedly supposed to mitigate his outbursts. 

No matter how many conversations and emails I've had with her, his parents, the principal, the other staff, and people acquainted with the situation, she still found the temerity to suggest it's something like me fumbling to intervene with this kid not according to his plan that resulted in his write-ups. I genuinely want to quit my job in this moment, because it feels like that kind of "perfectly impossible" scene where you've been contracted for a suicide mission. I'm not going to quit, at least not yet, but it's the kind of existentially hopeless place that's all-too familiar. The purported idealists don't wish to engage the hard reality. The one begging for reality to be taken seriously gets punished. Or, in Trumpian parlance, "I've been hearing things...." Oh, really? Cool, guess nothing matters and we'll just go with whatever you say or heard.

The crazier things feel, I look for definition. Writing is definition. You can "infer" whatever you want from what I say, but I can articulate the feeling, "I want to quit," allow the moments after to play out, and keep my job. I was hired to run a program. When I identify and define the things that were making it previously impossible to run, the next moment shouldn't be suspicion that I'm the problem. Especially not when the problem has been one for years. Now, if you're part of the problem, and my definitions are forcing you into new accountable territory, which you subsequently poorly react to, the fuck am I supposed to do with that? 

I'm not a "woo woo" person. I do think math says we're all connected, and things have felt elevated, especially the past few days. I've spent years finding a remote "chill" level to operate on in spite of it all, and lately that shit's proving ineffectual. I'm craving an ability or justification of simple and pure reactivity. It's the moment when an addict might relapse. It's when you've reached out to a few people to try and talk to, and they aren't there, and you're stuck, and enough time hasn't passed to make the worst option resonate as catastrophically as it will inevitably feel over time. When all the "little things" stack up back-to-back at otherwise shit times that compound. 

I'm exhausted. I'm going to go back to work, eat a lot of candy, complain about my stomach aching, and then go to a comedy show and drink tonight. The future is bleak.