dblum2390-blog

[dblum2390-blog]

Just say no to Twitter

I am an addict.

The second icon of the second row of my iPhone screen is a well-worn piece of glass. By instinct, if my attention span drifts for a few seconds, I pull out my phone touch that cursed blue bird. Instantly, every facility in my body becomes hyper focused at the scrolling, banal thoughts streaming in front of my face, 140 characters at a time.

After a few minutes on Twitter, I’m normally satiated. I’ve read all the new thoughts since three minutes ago when I checked last. My anxiety is up and my eyes are glazed over, but I’m not bored. But is it really better?

I have found that Twitter has drastically amplified my opinions, judgments, and perceptions. I know the entire back stories of things that 99.9% of the population don’t know exist. I know things as they happen, and they’re instantly old an hour later. Memes emerge and die in the span of a morning, replaced with something new, terrible, and different. Bernie Sanders is the only good politician; actually, he’s not that good, here’s why; no, that’s neoliberal nonsense!; leftism is the only true morality.

My last year or so of Twitter has turned me from a fairly orthodox, critical-race-theory adhering liberal to an unabashed socialist. I disliked Hillary initially because of her affiliations with the ‘94 crime bill and her international bellicosity; now I will freely call her a neoliberal without a full grasp of what that means. I full-throatedly believe in socialism and find the Democrats feckless and weak. I was rooting for Bernie Sanders to lose quickly so that Hillary would not be weakened (because she was so weak) so much that she could lose to Trump; now I know he would’ve won.

Much of this is due to my listening of Chapo Traphouse and its affiliates, but I would not have found this glorious podcast without Twitter. That being said, Twitter also magnifies bad opinions, causes people to be judged by stray 140 character thoughts, and can destroy people’s lives. There are people who view ‘posting as warfare,’ as Felix Biederman says. These people probably are even worse Twitter addicts than I am. I don’t have a personal brand and have toned down my posting to protect against a political disagreement unfollow (I like being followed by prominent Texas football media members), so I can’t identify with the feeling of assault these people claim to experience. I still think it’s stupid and short-sighted to get so angry about so-called ‘targeted online harassment,’ but I also feel like I shouldn’t even know what this means. 

I have tried to draw down my twitter usage, deleting it off my phone, not using Tweetdeck, and investigating ways to limit myself with parental locks. None have been effective. I continually use it, continue to be angrier, more anxious, and more judgmental. Maybe things aren’t so bad in the world as they appear on Twitter, but if I can’t get away from it, I’ll never know. Twitter is my reality. And it feels gross.

[dblum2390-blog]

The day my son was born

It’s an informal tradition that I can’t seem to find the origin of that you save the major newspaper of the day your child is born. My in-laws said they still had the papers in a box in their basement for each of their three daughters’ birthdays. They also pointed out the inherent paradox and weakness of newspapers that is was exposed by the internet: that they are yesterday’s news.

My father-in-law suggested that we keep both that day’s newspaper and the next day’s to reflect what the news actually was on the day my son is born. We are going to induce labor on Monday night, April 17, so he is expected to be born on Tuesday morning. This would mean a paper from Tuesday the 18th and Wednesday the 19th would encompass the breadth of the ‘news’ of Charlie’s birthday.

However, the news today is grim. The United States is led by a senile fool, controlled entirely by an ever revolving group of political opportunists who only seem to care about their own advancement. This situation is reminiscent of the fall of other great Empires of the past, and while the United States has an entrenched bureaucracy sustaining the wheels of government, the daily circus is still scary to many people living here.

My anxiety is compounded by the fact that I am having my first child. I don’t know what world Charlie will grow up in; will the United States continue to chug along as a slowly dying behemoth of right-wing, ultra-capitalism? Will the fissures opened by the 2016 election result in a more egalitarian (socialist!) political reality? History suggests the former. I want my son to grow up in the optimistic world I did in the 1990′s, where the biggest worry for a little kid was trying to figure out why your parents were being vague about the Monica Lewinsky scandal (what happened?). I understand that this is largely a privileged viewpoint, that the Clinton years were bad for many and have had catastrophic long-term effects. But this is an inherently selfish time for me; I’m thinking solely about my son’s future well-being. 

My outlook on life, the nexus of any political thought I might have, and my feeling of security in my country’s future and goodness were altered forever by the double-whammy of 9/11 (why would someone want to do this to us? Oh...) and then the invasion of Iraq. As New Orleans drowned 90 miles down the road from where I lived, the government did nothing. But an obscure dictator in a country thousands of miles away might pose a threat to us in an endlessly complicated set of hypothetical events? Immediate mobilization, commitment of billions of dollars, and the expenditure of financial and political capital.

I want Charlie’s life to be good. I want him to grow up in the optimistic climate i did, even if that was largely a facade. And yet, as our foolish President blunders headfirst into crisis after crisis, I don’t know what his life will be like. We live around Washington, D.C.; will he have to live in fear of reprisal for something awful his country has done? Will he learn to drive on a decaying road system as wealth concentration robs the government of its ability to maintain infrastructure? Will he ever live in a house owned by his parents, or even buy one himself? Will the ice caps melt, the skies scorch, and millions be displaced as the United States ignores its responsibility to try to counter long-term climate damage? I don’t know. 

So I don’t know what the news will be on Charlie’s birthday,. I don’t know if it’s going to read “U.S. bombs North Korea!” or “President Trump says the n-word!” But I’m also worried about the news on his fifth birthday, his fifteenth, and his fiftieth. It feels (like it probably has to many in less and more serious times) like we are on the precipice of some great change in human civilization, a turning point. And it’s in that moment that my wife and I are bringing a son into the world. 

I’m very scared.