A Shadow Of My Former Self

My shadow, photographed in Harker Heights, Texas, on Dec. 15, 2018.

As previously established, I’m not so much of a “New Year’s Resolution” type person as I am a “what can I do better?” kind of person. Sure, I do occasionally make resolutions, and sometimes I keep them, like when I resolved in December 1999 to not cut my hair during the year 2000 — I succeeded so much that I didn’t cut my hair until 2004.

One thing I think I can do better, with this blog anyway, is to continue pulling my focus away from the news of the moment and increasingly focus on bigger ideas and longterm trends. I know I’ve been doing this anyway, though I sometimes get my initial inspiration from a current news story. But I want to (1) make it more clear in my writing that this is what I’m doing, and (2) be certain while I’m writing that this is what I’m doing.

In other words, I want to push back just a little against the Twitter/Facebook-inspired “right now” culture, which is only capable of focusing on issues that are currently happening. Trying to emulate that mindset is frenetic and self-destructive, which isn’t something I want to be or do. It means you have to write about something this minute or the moment will be over. Who wants to read my opinions on a school shooting if there’s already been another one? I think about this every time I see a news story about TAINTUS’s latest “tweet storm”; by the time they’ve written that story and by the time I’ve read it, TAINTUS has already tweeted yet another gaffe, untruth, or untruthful gaffe.

Based on what I know of the few regular readers here, this won’t be a problem. All of you seem to enjoy thinking in broader terms about bigger-picture ideas and are less likely than the average person to fall for the clickbait, newer-is-better, this-story-is-already-old style of thinking that permeates the internet. Additionally, the few comments I do get from strangers or new readers are very often on older blog entries about exactly these longterm, more general ideas.

This doesn’t mean I will cease commentary on new events; it just means I will attempt to place the new events into a larger framework.

I think you will all agree that it is very often pointless to react too strongly to something that’s just happened. How many times have we seen an arrest story where all the comments are “put him away for life!” only to find out six months later that the guy didn’t actually do it? Or a story about a wreck involving a self-driving car where all the comments are “cars need human drivers!” only to find out after a full investigation that the crash was caused by a poorly-driving human in another vehicle?

I have a poor track record with specific examples, and usually only provide them because I was trained to (or because readers sometimes understand the general idea better if presented with a specific example). I do better when thinking about more general topics. The problem with general topics is that they usually don’t generate the same level of emotion that specific, immediate stories do. But the problem with specific, immediate topics is that our focus is too narrow and we learn to forget them as soon as the next currently happening thing arises. It also means we end up arguing about specifics of that particular incident instead of the much more concerning larger trend.

To provide a concrete example of what I mean: A guest at a Double Tree hotel in Portland, Oregon, was kicked out for — apparently — using a phone while black. This story is now nearly a week old, but it was pretty immediate a few days ago, all over Twitter and popping up in headline feeds. If I attempt to blog about this particular, specific incident, any conversation that arises will delve into specifics of this encounter, specifics that most of us will never know because we weren’t there. Joe might argue that the security guard was just doing his job, and Jane might retort that he overstepped his bounds. (No offense to either Joe or Jane; both are welcome here.)

But I’d rather talk about how this keeps happening, how the people of color in my life have always known this happens, and how they’ve learned to live their lives differently than me because their risks are greater. I would rather examine the greater problem of how our ingrained, unconscious biases directly affect the lives of other people. It seems more helpful, longterm, for me to think about whether I, personally, have some of these biases and what I can do about them. I think it is more beneficial to talk about how a lot of people quickly resort to calling the police in order to solve a relatively minor problem, or in order to bully someone who isn’t actually causing a problem — when the police can better serve us all by not being called in these incidents. There are in fact a dozen branching topics that this single news story can lead us to, all of which are more important to discuss than whether this one man’s experience was fueled by racism or was simply a misunderstanding (as Double Tree claims).

Already, right there, just because I mentioned the Portland incident, I begin to worry that at least one comment below will want to dwell on that incident rather than any of the larger issues. I feel the need to clearly state: I’m not talking about Jermaine Massey’s visit to Portland. That isn’t the topic here. I’m also not talking (in this entry) about the larger issues of racial bias. Everything in the previous two paragraphs was a specific example to illustrate my larger point.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

(For a second improvement I’m making to this blog, read the next entry: Worth Reading.)