Empress of Dorsa update:
Total words today: 0 so far but I will write as soon as I finish this post.
Manuscript total: 5,388 of about 120,000 projected
(That’s right, I started over.)
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“What’s happening feels a lot like the ’60s,” my friend E said to me as we discussed politics, race, coronavirus, and living in a dystopian society.
E and I were both born in the ’70s, so in reality it’s hard for us to verify that it “feels like the ’60s.” But I take her point: for better or for worse, change is in the air. Revolution is in the air.
But with a very big difference.
Perhaps it is just the way I was educated in history in a “Heroes and Holidays” fashion, but it seems to me that the social and political revolution of the 1960s orbited around major figureheads: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Rosa Parks; Malcolm X; Medgar Evers; Cesar Chavez; Gloria Steinem. And then on the right we had George Wallace; Bull Connor; Anita Bryant.
But where are those figureheads today, on the right or on the left (other than the Internet Troll-in-Chief, He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named)?
Our figureheads are all dead.
Our modern figureheads are martyrs.
George Floyd.
Ahmad Aubrey.
Breona Taylor.
Rayshard Brooks.
Trayvon Martin.
Tamir Rice.
Yes, the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s had its martyrs as well — Emmett Till comes first to mind, photos of the bloodied Freedom Riders and fire hosed children also come to mind. Not to mention the four little girls who died in Birmingham, AL, when white supremacists fire-bombed their church.
But these days, it’s easier for me to name a dozen martyrs than two leaders.
Not that there AREN’T leaders — of course there are! Hundreds, probably thousands, of people are working their tails off to organize and advocate and energize and speak up.
But instead of rallying around one or two faces who represent the modern revolution, we rally around George Floyd. We rally around Breona Taylor. Instead of a Dr. King-type-figure, we have people like Kimberly Jones, whose impromptu, passionate explanation of why some protesters are destructive went viral, and Na Dorch, a twenty-two year old from Brooklyn with zero organizing experience who nevertheless organized a successful peaceful protest of several thousand using only a few flyers and the Internet.
A hypothesis on why we don’t have larger-than-life heroes this time around… and why that might be a good thing.
I often wonder what Dr. King would make of everything that’s happening now. But I also wonder if he could have ever risen to the same kind of prominence if he’d started in the 2010s instead of the 1960s.
I imagine a Dr. King who started in the 2010s might have gained some initial traction due to his oratorial skills, visionary message, and ability to organize people, but then, come 2018, I think he might’ve gotten caught up by the #MeToo movement. After all, as much as I appreciate Dr. King, he had quite an appetite when it came to women and was unable to be faithful to his wife. I think tales of sexual harassment probably would have dampened his rising star, and people never would have fully trusted what he had to say again.
Honestly, to me it doesn’t take away from who Dr. King was and what he accomplished, but it does serve as a reminder that the people we put on pedestals are, at the end of the day, only imperfect humans like the rest of us. As my dad used to say, “All my idols have clay feet.”
I think the Internet *might* mean we will never have a Dr. King again, because it’s exceedingly good at revealing all those clay feet.
In today’s “cancel culture,” it’s hard for anyone to get away with hiding their flaws for long before getting called out. Which in turn makes it hard for anyone to rise to the status of “Hero” — at least not to the level of our heroes of the past.
But maybe that’s not a bad thing?? Because without over-sized heroes to worship, maybe the responsibility for real change is pushed back to us, all the “little people” who have to take responsibility for steering this behemoth that is modern Western culture.
In other words, the revolution will not be centralized. It will not be in the hands of the DNC or RNC or NAACP or any other acronym. Neither will it be in the hands of any handful of charismatic individuals.
Instead, it’s in the hands of every person with a cell phone who happens to capture an interaction that shocks the rest of us. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s better to have one hero per week than one hero per year.
However, the revolution might not just be in the hands of the masses. It might also be in the hands of whoever happens to currently control Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google. Which brings me to…
Will the Internet save us or destroy us?
While the modern push for equity, mutual understanding, and empathy is bubbling forth from the online neighborhoods created by the Internet, so is the modern push for white supremacy, demonization of anyone who doesn’t agree with us, radicalization of both the right and left, and — fueling all that — the proliferation of falsehoods.
I watched an HBO documentary yesterday about the deliberate weaponization of fake news and disinformation by both right and left wing operatives, and it was truly TERRIFYING, because we have genuinely reached a point where none of us knows what to believe anymore and multiple parties with a wide range of agendas are actively trying to deceive us.
Part of what’s terrifying is how easy it is to get people to believe falsehoods. If your friend posts it, it must be true. And since I know most of you reading this are liberal, let me just remind you that people with left-leaning agendas promote falsehoods, too. Case in point:
This meme was circulating amongst my friends a few years ago, and most people I knew believed it. Why wouldn’t they? It certainly sounded like something Trump would say. And if it *sounds* accurate, then we’ll just take it as accurate and move on, because who has time to fact-check every single meme they come across while lying in bed and scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Twitter?
In that particular case, something compelled me to fact check the meme. But how many other memes have I just accepted at face value? (At “Facebook” value.)
So while it’s interesting and maybe even encouraging to watch the decentralized, amazing grassroots (or “digitalroots”) efforts for real change taking place in the wake of the George Floyd murder, or prior to that, the tangible cultural changes that were triggered by the #MeToo movement, it’s simultaneously deeply disconcerting to recognize the very injustices we are pushing back on are also at least in part created by (or at minimum sustained by) the very same digital environment that is mobilizing us to fight in the first place!
The End
I don’t really have a good way to conclude this post. As usual, this is just me rambling, speaking mostly to myself and to the two or three people who bother to skim through half of all this. Adding yet more white noise to the cacophony of the Internet. LOL. I guess I’m just trying to make note of, perhaps document, this precarious time we are living through, as our technology outpaces our ability to discriminate fact from fiction, benefit from harm.
Sometimes I wish I could just fast-forward through this time and come to its end, to see what the results are of this era and what has become of the democratic institutions we constructed so painstakingly during the Enlightenment.
I always assumed inertia itself would keep those institutions going, both for better and for worse.
But an object in motion acted upon by an outside force can still be stopped. The Internet might be the agent of change we need… or it might be a suicide bomb strapped to our collective chest.
So where will this current revolution lead us? Will the Internet burn it all to the ground? (Is that good or bad?) And if everything does burn, what happens after that?
Will we rise up like a phoenix, stronger and more beautiful than ever before, or will we just remain as ash?
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