Remember the Coke commercials from the 70's?
Imagine…a time when a call for unity and love was actually the stuff of pop culture.
Lately, I find myself wading in a puddle of nostalgia...
One yearns for the times when people sought love
And light, and unity..
And consciously chose
NOT to do things they COULD do...
But shouldn't.
I know.
I was going to keep my blog positive, beautiful and affirming.
Then I made the mistake of clicking on an article on the Foxfire home screen that really pissed me off. So, of course, I have to rant about it. At least a little.
The article is titled "The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter." It's an opinion piece based on the premise that the Biden press briefing room has become so boring that White House reporting has lost ratings (horror of horrors!) and newsrooms are going elsewhere for the kind of news that produces clicks, views, and ad revenue. Oh my fucking god!!!
I'll confess, I didn't read the whole article. I got so peeved I had to make it go away. All I could think was, here is some idiot millennial who hasn't a clue what role news is supposed to play in a democratic republic, whining that the actual STUFF of government is too boring to make stars out of the folks who report it. Because it's not selling soap, so "news"rooms are going elsewhere to get the good stuff.
This is everything--E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.--that is wrong with 21st-century "journalism."
I wrote about this all the way back in 2005, after reading a book called "Bad News" by Tom Fenton, a former foreign news service reporter. He bemoaned the fact that foreign news had become so "uninteresting" since the dawn of for-profit news, that major networks all but closed down their foreign offices in order to concentrate on the juicier soap operas happening right here on our own shores. Here is a link to the piece I wrote back then: The News Is All Bad
My most succinct distillation of the issue facing the nation with the demand for "interesting" (read: sensational enough to capture the eyes of our hyper-consuming public) news was this:
With the advent of cable television, with its all-news formats creating the 24-hour news cycle, the Big Three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—suddenly found themselves competing for viewers in an arena where, obviously, there were big bucks to be made (after all, CNN seemed to be rolling in dough…) The news departments were designated "profit centers," where they had once been public service. Their mission changed from serving the public to entertaining it; and that, in one fell swoop, spelled the end of any meaningful news reaching the eyes of the American people.
That was seventeen years ago. I think it can be said that, in the interim, Trump and his outrageous, evil antics multiplied exponentially the potential for disaster precipitated by this move to "for-profit news."
This, more than even the explosion of social media, is what has led us down the path that we are on now: The one to the ultimate destruction of our government and the American way of life.
How do we change direction--go back--especially if the journalism field is now dominated by youngsters like whoever wrote this ridiculous Politico opinion piece bemoaning the "boring" Biden Administration; "reporters" who have no idea that what they're doing has the potential to destroy the country?
We are in such big trouble.
*Note: I did go back and try to read the rest of the article. I'll confess once again, I didn't make it to the end. But this time, it was more a case of "TLDR" (Too Long, Didn't Read) While I don't like to look like I have the millennials' gnat-like attention span, the article could have done with some judicious "OK, that's enough" editing. Seems like the author was trying to turn the tenor of the article back in the direction of "It's ok if the White House is 'boring,' it's not supposed to be the bad reality show it's been for the past several years... " But he never actually got there. So while I'm willing to concede that perhaps the writer wasn't the first tier idiot I thought he was at the outset, he didn't convincingly prove he wasn't, either.
It’s been a while since I’ve snapped a photo of a bird I have not photographed before. I’ve been kind of uninspired for the past several months, camera-wise. I’ve pretty much done the raptors, ducks and geese found in these parts. I haven’t photographed a lot of songbirds, mostly because the little guys are so busy and quick that they’re gone before I can yank my camera out, pint it and shoot. I’m lucky to get a recognizable image of one of the little guys; actually framing a pleasant composition with a songbird in it is rare indeed.
So…this is not that. But it is an acceptable image of a bird I’ve not had the pleasure to witness partaking at my feeder before. Behold, the Western Tanager:
Every morning, I do a salutation to the four compass points.
When I face the East, I ask the Heart of the Universe to bathe us in its light, that we would reject our darkness.
Lately, the Universe has whispered that I should ditch the generic "we/us" and make my ask much more personal.
"Bathe ME in your light..."
And the Universe responded, "Something in your life is blocking the Light."
Twitter. Twitter was blocking the light.
The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that swimming in the cesspool was not doing anything positive for anyone. Not for any "contacts" I had on that platform. Not for me. Not for anyone.
So...I have ditched it.
It was surprisingly hard to make it happen...but I realized that what passes for "community" on twitter are connections that are sad, and loose, and entirely superficial. And disposable.
So I disposed of it.
For now, my social media "connections" will be Instagram and this blog.
I've abandoned the idea of online community, and even of online friendships.
But I'm going to try to keep "Coming to Terms" and my Instagram feed positive, beautiful and affirming.
I'm tired of being turned inside out by wading in negativity.
Time to drag myself out of the cesspool and into the light.
Yesterday morning, I woke up, opened my email, and got utterly blindsided by this:
All I could do was stare down at my ipad and breathe: "What? WHAT? WHAT?!?
It had to be a joke. It had to be a vicious, unfunny hack from somewhere.
There was no reason in the world that any reasonable human being could look at eighteen years of posts on "Coming to Terms" and decide it was "spam."
What the fuck IS a spam blog, anyway?
I went to my bookmarks, clicked on the one for my blogger dashboard. Up came "Women On."
"Coming to Terms" was, indeed, gone.
Eighteen and a half years of my life--my stories, my essays, by personal journal, my pictures--evaporated into the ether.
Just like that. With no warning. And for no discernible reason that I could possibly imagine. Spam, indeed!
When I recovered my senses enough to take some kind of action, I clicked on their "unlock blog" link, and I was taken to one of those stupid "recaptcha" screens where I had to click on all the pictures containing palm trees.
That evaporated, and a little message box came up, saying something to the effect that obviously I'm not a robot, since only a real human being could perform their little hoop-jumping exercise. So the "blogger team" would review my request to have my blog unlocked...and they were sorry for any inconvenience caused by their spam algorithms, which are not perfect, and they're still working on the bugs, and thank you and we're sorry...heh heh. They would let me know their answer in a couple of days.
And that was it. "Coming to Terms" was gone. I had fulfilled the only option available to me to get it back. And now I needed to "wait." My favorite thing in the whole wide world.
Given the chance to think about it a little more, I came to the conclusion that the source of the "report" was very probably someone I had pissed off with a comment on Twitter. Like an idiot, I posted a link to my blog in my Twitter profile. I had thought I was promoting myself...that perhaps I could lure a few more readers. It never entered my mind that I had put a loaded weapon out there in the middle of the culture war battlefield, where anyone with bad intent and a rudimentary knowledge about how social media work, could pick it up and blow my head off with it.
I was of two minds as to how to deal with this...unbelievable turn of random events.
One side of me said, "Calm down. This is ridiculous. Of course they're going to give you back your blog. They have no reason to destroy it."
But I also knew there was no such thing as "the blogger team." There are no human eyes examining the content of blogger blogs, any more than there are on Facebook or Twitter. It's all about algorithms and machines that react to clicks. Some asshole came to my blog and clicked "report," and some machine grabbed 18 years of my life and wiped it off the internet. There's no reasoning with that. There's no appeal process when you KNOW they are absolutely wrong. There's just "click here and we'll let you know." And hoping that it's the right click to get an algorithm to decide to let me have those 18 years back.
So I prepared myself for the worst. I told myself that this might be the Universe telling me that my little blog "no longer served," and making the decision for me that it was time to let go of it. I steeled myself to accept that and move on. It was only a blog, not my life, that was ending. I could go on without it. I would go on without it. I would survive.
But I would have to survive with a hole in my soul that you could drive a truck through. Because that was how I felt.
Through all the bullshit of the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, through the process of social media becoming cesspools of political misinformation and central battlefields of America's ever-expanding culture war, I always thought of "Coming to Terms" as my safe place. It was mine. My own little corner of the internet. If only by virtue of the number of years I've kept it going...there had to at least be some kind of squatter's rights that apply to this lonely, crumbling little corner of ancient internet. Right?
Seriously? Hah! It was never mine. It doesn't belong to me. I only lease this little, tiny, unremarkable speck in a huge ethereal metropolis. And the powers that be can and will kick my ass right out, on a whim, with no provocation. AOL did it fourteen years ago. What made me think Blogger was any different?
So, last night, about 7:00 pm. I check my email, and am greeted by this:
Relieved? Yes.
Ready to forgive, forget, and keep soldiering on as if this never happened? Not hardly.
If anything, my perennial love/hate relationship with social media has advanced to hate/hate. Seething, unrelenting hate/hate.
I don't see how I can continue relying on the internet at all, for anything. Not for social interaction, not for information, not for an outlet for my brain meanderings. Certainly not for a place to put things close to my heart so even my smallest audience of less than a dozen souls can read, and know me, and agree or disagree, or at least know I'm still alive.
I always thought I knew that being on Twitter was like dancing with a poisonous snake, but I never imagined actually getting bitten, and what that would look like.
Now I know.
And now, I have to figure out what I want to do about this whole mess.
But I strongly suspect that my internet presence is going to shrink drastically...possibly to nothing.
I'll have to see.
In parting, this is what I have to say to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and all varieties and permutations of social media that have cropped up like deadly toadstools in the past 20 years:
...and the evil capitalist AI horse--the one dragging the world over the cliff into the abyss--that you rode in on.
If Joe Biden does nothing else during his administration, he did put in motion the process for this historic appointment to the SCOTUS. For that, we thank him. Welcome to the court, Justice Jackson.
People need to get a clue about the nature of mankind and where evil resides. Had this exchange with someone on Twitter...
A couple of posts ago, I lamented the deep well of evil that seems to reside inside every human heart. The well that is so easily tapped. The source from which we are able and more than willing to broadcast evil to every corner of the world we come in contact with.
One of the theoretical building blocks of many human religions, certainly of Christianity, since I heard it many times when we were in that world, is that humans have an inborn yearning for God. I've heard it said that we're born with a god-shaped hole in our hearts.
Maybe that's true. But I think it's more likely that mankind has spent a tremendous amount of time, brain power, concentration and energy searching for someone or something to scrape our shortcomings on to. This evil that we can't seem to control, that does such grievous damage when we allow it to escape and fester in the world...that can't possibly come from us! So we project it on to an outside source, and create a celestial custodian whose job it is to clean up the disasters our evil leaves behind. And when it doesn't, we whine and cry and grovel and curse. Instead of getting a clue that the disaster comes from US and it's OUR job to clean it up. And perhaps to take enough control of our weak selves that we keep the disasters from occurring in the first place.
The state of our country and the world at large has me indulging in a great deal of thought about where evil comes from, what it does, and whose job it is to deal with it...something we had all better figure out soon, or the consequences are going to be cataclysmic.
For the first 40 years of my life, I clung to the family of my birth. My parents and sisters were central to my existence. I married, we bought a home, we acquired pets and jobs and stuff. We had a life, my husband and I, but it was always in orbit around my parents and family. I would make little independent forays away for awhile, but I never went very far, and I always snapped back to them, like steel to a magnet. When they moved away from me, I followed them.
Then, all at once, I was exiled from the center of my family. Following my dad’s death, in the midst of complicated issues of guilt, grief, and control, my mother and sisters pushed me away, turned their backs on me and marginalized me to the point that it was too painful to remain in physical proximity to the family of which I was no longer a cherished member. So I packed up husband, dog and cats and moved away. Only 120 miles away, but more away—physically and emotionally—than I had ever been from the roots of my existence.
And I stayed away for eighteen years.
Mostly, I developed a tough skin. I learned how to get along on my own. I figured out how to extract joy from life by broadening my horizons with solitary activities. (And I ran a restaurant that ate five years of my life.) I learned how to be without my family. It’s not that we didn’t visit, spend times together, heal our relationship some over that 18 years. But the relationship we’ve cobbled together with the broken pieces is vastly different from the one that was my life and breath 25 years ago, before Dad died and our world changed forever.
I am actually mostly okay with that. I suppose the umbilical had to be cut sometime, and maybe the reason it was so painful when it was cut was that I had waited far too long to do the deed…waited, in fact, until it was cut for me. And that was not destined to be a smooth transition.
Three years ago, I got sick of the redneck world we had moved to, tired of living so far away from the place we had chosen as home when we left actual home, and a little paranoid about what our choices were going to be, with retirement roaring up on us like a freight train. Some stubborn, residual attachment planted deep in my brain insisted that family still meant comfort and safety. So we “downsized” back to Eugene, back to the land of my sisters, for better or worse.
I don’t think I had any lofty expectations about how this was going to affect our relationship. I guess I hoped it would bring us closer. I guess I was just tired of being so alone all the time, and any scraps of companionship I could scrape together would be better than the solitary existence that had become so colorless and lonely. And for the most part, that’s how it has played out. And it’s okay. Good enough, anyway. My life is certainly far superior to what it was, even taking into consideration the last two pandemic-ridden years.
But the reason I’m writing this, the thing I’ve come to notice more and more, is that, when I’m with the sisters, I’m…invisible. I don’t much get a word in edgewise. My “problems” are not problems to them, because each of them seems to have life challenges that are so much more difficult than mine. To them, I come from a place that is solid (in that I have a successful 45-year marriage to a man who is actually a reasonable human being) and secure (we have a home with no mortgage payments, make enough money to pay the bills and have a little left over.) So my role it so sit and smile and give no input when conversation drifts to life’s difficulties. Okay.
However, if I DO try to add my voice, or relate a story that I believe contributes to the conversation, they talk over me as if I haven’t even opened my mouth.
THAT bugs the shit out of me. I find myself pulling back and avoiding spending too much time among the sisters. A situation I had hoped I would not have to navigate any more. But there it is.
And it sucks, because I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to doing things by myself again.
Shopping alone isn’t any fun. It never was, but I did it and told myself it was fine. Going out for little picnics and little photo-shoots and drives/walk out in nature by myself is just…lonely. I could do that, and I have. It’s obviously better than not going at all. But I’m not excited about re-visiting that chapter of my life.
So here I am, destined to pick my way between unfulfilling solitude and companionship that is almost equally unfulfilling.
Bah. Here we go again.
While my sister spends the day freaking out about the number of candles on her birthday cake (if we could find that many...)
I'll take a few moments to remember the man with whom she shares a birthday. The finest man it has ever been my privilege to have known.
Miss you, Dad. You were the best.
