On Monday, senator and former vice presidential hopeful Tim Kaine was one of the many people stuck on I-95 following a major snowstorm that blanketed Virginia, Maryland, and DC:
I started my normal 2 hour drive to DC at 1pm yesterday. 19 hours later, I’m still not near the Capitol. My office is in touch with @VaDOT to see how we can help other Virginians in this situation. Please stay safe everyone. pic.twitter.com/Sz1b1hZJZ5
— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) January 4, 2022
The Twitter replies to Kaine were predictable, ranging from (justified) comments about our need for better infrastructure to (similarly justified) snark about how our country has a huge defense budget and yet local governments can’t keep the roads clear.
The coming snowstorm was well publicized, and while advised to stay off the roads, many people had places to be. Kaine and many others were stuck in transit for over 24 hours.
The incident resulted in the usual, vacuous responses about how America is “in collapse.” It echoed a vacuous recent article by Stephen Marche that spoke about how a peaceful breakup of the United States is actually a good thing, since the other option is a violent breakup.
I’m not going to link to Marche’s article, simply because it’s so bad that it makes me think his upcoming book on the matter will not be any better — and I don’t like giving bad articles hate clicks.
I will say this though: People fuming about “collapse” or snidely arguing for a “national divorce” have no idea what they’re talking about.
I witnessed a real collapse firsthand when the Soviet Union fell apart while I was a small child, younger than my son is today.
Our family was comparatively insulated — by insulated I mean that I only got off with life-long post-traumatic stress due to violent crime spilling over into my life, my father often had to hunt to provide us with decent nutrition, and we fled for our lives just a few years later — and the Soviet empire is not a place I miss, even as I miss my loved ones and enjoy old Soviet comedies.
Still, that feeling of being swept up by chaos, of not having a sense of “who’s flying this plane,” will stay with me always.
Americans have a lot to lose, but as Ryan Holiday once pointed out in his book Trust Me: I’m Lying — a work that, in my view, predicted the Trump era — we are just not communicating well with each other.
Online communication, instant and rewarding, makes us feel like we’re benefiting society when we’re blowing off steam online. Making fun of Tim Kaine wasn’t an act of helping. Bemoaning the transit authorities wasn’t what got I-95 finally moving in spite of the snow not having melted right away.
Yet we are invested in the dangerous illusion that snark by itself is somehow helping change society for the better. That if only we do it often enough, we’re going to strengthen ourselves, as opposed to weaken the already fragile horizontal bonds in our society. We’re lying to ourselves, and what’s worse — the lies feel good.
We say we want a robust, interconnected civil society, but what we really crave is outrage and attention
Yesterday, a journalist in Indiana wrote a short tweet about how journalists shouldn’t record all interviews. Meandering, quote-heavy pieces are often the result of an over-reliance on a transcribed interview, and that’s a good discussion for many people in my field to have. Instead, everyone, including people with much bigger platforms, assumed the worst, tore into the author of the tweet, ratioed her, and made a mockery of her work.
You’d think that constant attacks on the media would result in some sense of solidarity among colleagues, but making fun of people online is simply too addictive. I’m sure the journalist’s tweet will now be brought up should her local paper hold a fundraiser, or otherwise try to rely on the community. We bemoan the dangerous demise of local media, but are willing to tear apart a local journalist if they’re not clever or savvy enough for a second. We say we want a robust, interconnected civil society, but what we really crave is outrage and attention. We want an easy way out, in other words.
The streets are neatly swept up in my city tonight, getting around in a car is currently annoying but bearable, and by the looks of it, nothing is collapsing. I’m grateful for that, because I know what the alternative looks like.
Social media amplifies negativity, but when I go outside, I can chat to my neighbors, drop by the store that’s still well stocked in spite of the weather, pandemic, and stress on the supply chain, and breathe air that’s going to get even fresher now that DC has banned gas-powered leaf blowers. I don’t live in a perfect, or even equal society, but I can work on making it more equal without potentially getting shot for my trouble — so far, anyway.
It’s important to log off, take stock of reality, and come up with plans on how to make reality better. Being stuck with our devices, ranting about a “failed state,” is making failures of us all. Our thoughts impact our behaviors. We should try to think better ones every once in a while.
Image credit: camilo jimenez