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It’s the night before the U.S. election and we are all on edge - especially in light of the dumpster fire that has been the year 2020.
My fellow liberals and I are terrified a second Trump term will tear our country apart. My conservative friends and family members fear the same will happen if Biden wins the election.
But I think there may be something worse than either candidate taking office.
Almost two years ago, I watched a teenager’s face get plastered all over social media and labeled as the face of patriarchy and white supremacy, because he wouldn’t move out of the way of a chanting Native American elder at the Right to Life march in D.C. Memes were shared, bandwagons were jumped on, anger flared. As his smirking face and his MAGA hat flooded my newsfeed, I felt my own righteousness rise up. How dare he?! The arrogant bastard! Let him suffer the consequences of public humiliation now!
Later that night, however, I decided to go on YouTube to watch the entire forty-something-minute video of the incident. I wanted the whole story. I wanted to try to understand what exactly happened. And what I saw in the full context of that video did not entirely convince me of the popular narrative.
I am not here to defend him, and I certainly do not share his conservative views. But I try to imagine how my friends and I would have reacted at 16, if an elder marched up to us playing drums and chanting. I think we would have felt awkward. We might not have known how to react. We might have glanced sideways at each other and smirked, raised our eyebrows, sent telepathic messages like, "Dude, what the-?" Because when I was 16, I did travel to D.C. with my Catholic high school for the Right to Life March. When I was 16, my worldview wasn't fully formed yet. Back then, I was mostly excited about the overnight bus trip with friends, laughing in the back seats and discussing our adolescent dramas, maybe listening to Savage Garden CDs on our discmans. I didn't become pro-choice until I was an adult. What would have happened if social media had been around then? Would I still have changed my mind about this issue if it were mine and my friends' faces plastered all over the internet, our teenage discomfort wrongly interpreted as arrogance? Maybe. Or maybe, seeing how quickly I was judged, my views would have become increasingly more conservative.
Watching that video I thought about all of those things. I thought about how quickly we all condemned a 16-year-old child. But I did not speak up then. I didn’t want to be perceived as suggesting a viewpoint that was not “left” enough.
It’s because everything has become so polarized now. We stare at our screens, falling prey to algorithms and our biased newsfeeds and groupthink. You’re either this one thing or you’re not. In the year 2020, for example, if you show support for police officers in any way, we can make all sorts of assumptions about you. You're a Trump supporter. You're a racist bigot. We can no longer be friends.
Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash
This is what it has come to. We liberals immediately judge conservatives, who in turn see us as elitist, so no, they're not going to listen to us. Maybe they dig in their heels and scoff at us reading books about white fragility. On the flip side, we don’t want to listen to anything conservatives have to say, either; their support for Trump is enough to make us completely shut down, and disregard all of their arguments against what they see as our socialist agenda.
Amid the cacophony of this social media noise, we all end up ignoring the bigger picture: that as much as we love to lay all the blame at their feet, politicians aren’t the only ones responsible for the current polarization.
In the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris (former design ethicist at Google) discusses how social media has been used in recent years to sow chaos and discord, creating two sides who cannot and will not hear each other anymore. He states, “We in the tech industry have created the tools to destabilize and erode the fabric of society in every country, all at once, everywhere.” This statement may initially sound overly dramatic and dystopian, but I’m not so sure that it is - especially when I see, over and over again, how quickly we rush to judge and hate those on the other side. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, this is incredibly easy to do.
So now, even though it makes me sick to my stomach to think that we could have a repeat of 2016 tomorrow, it is this social-media-fueled division that ultimately worries me the most.
Because when we find ourselves on two opposite sides of a barricade, staring each other down and refusing to listen - what happens then? Where do we go from there?
Politicians come and go. We the people are the ones who remain. And we all have a part to play in how divided or how united we end up becoming.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
“For there is no greater gift than to be part of a movement larger than ourselves. That means that we only need to be responsible for our small patch of sky, our specific area of influence. We need only to shine our particular point of light, long and steady, to become part of stories sewn into the heavens.”