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One exasperated child to another: Oh, bug off!
Sean to a troll: Click off!
Last week I was on the phone long distance to my cousin. She’s pretty and blond, yet not dumb. I mentioned that, thanks to the BBC News web page showing which U.S. states were trying to roll back the federal 1973 court case of Roe versus Wade, I now knew which states not to invest in or move to.
My cousin didn’t know that Roe versus Wade covered only the first three months of pregnancy, but did “know,” with scorn, that some states allowed abortion “at eight months.” (I doubt that) And she didn’t know about “trigger laws.” So I explained that some states had legislation all worded and ready to go, to be proposed the day the federal court allows the new Texas law of “no abortion after six weeks, not even for rape or incest.”
(Side Note: If the Texans honestly believed in their new law, then they wouldn’t have deviously written it to be impossible for honest Texans to challenge in court. (using a test case))
Considering she knew of the one “fact,” but not the other, I was left with a dread conclusion: My cousin has “drank the Kool-Aid,” has “jumped through the computer screen,” has “gone down the rabbit hole” of getting ALL of her information from social media. What could I advise her? Well, to find perspective from the past, I guess:
It is 1962, and a time traveler from our century has gone back to teach high school English, blending in among the locals, with his secret agenda: He is trying to prevent “that day in Dallas.” It’s all in the book by Stephen King, a former teacher himself, titled 11/22/63. In one critical scene the secret traveler confronts a sincere clean cut football player. The student believes (a) he is no good academically, and (b) he cannot try out for the school play. The teacher sternly advises the boy that while the “social mores” of his time say football players have to be uncultured dumb athletes… he should know better!
For comical time travel, remember the movie poster slogan of “Where were you in ’62?” ? I liked that show American Graffiti. Great soundtrack. Upon reflection, it’s queer to think that all those kids having such fun were all in the same echo chamber, as if they were all viewing the same social media. Here’s Roger Ebert’s review.
At least that athlete didn’t live in the early 1950’s, not like the sad people in the movie Last Exit To Brooklyn. Ebert noted, “There isn’t even any music to release these characters—rock ‘n’ roll is still in the future, and the pop ballads of the era mock the passions of everyday life.” The characters include a homosexual having a limp wrist and a pansy-style lack of self esteem. I wonder now if he, like that football player, was trying to live up to society’s mistaken ideas.
(Side Note: Another mistake, against the law in Canada, is “conversion therapy.” Ebert’s movie review.)
Nobody could have guessed there would one day be bronco riding and steer wrestling—such strong wrists!—at the Gay Rodeo. That event could only happen after gays achieved legal “freedom of assembly” to gather in broad daylight. That freedom was only allowed, I regret to say, after violence against police in New York City during the summer of ’69. Once free to exist, gay men and women could converse to break through their era’s literal “social conditioning,” like breaking away from a figurative “nation-wide social media.”
From those days I can travel forward in time to the later 20th century to view the hallowed halls of my big university: Thousands of people flowing by, yet during all my years on campus I saw no boys with limp wrists, no girls in gay pink dresses. (Not even in the club for LGBTQ students—or whatever they called themselves back then)
By now some of my religious readers have clicked off.
Truth has come from lifting my head up from my computer, forsaking dirty social media. Verily, I for one roll my eyes at anti-vaxxers who are intently drooling over misinformation propagated by foreign troll farms.
Now the anti-vaxxers have clicked off.
For readers willing to give truth a chance, today (Dec 22 Calgary Sun page 21) it is reported that a veteran police officer of 22 years has resigned because he won’t take the vaccine. As you will recall from the news, the many scientists for various covid vaccines could not be rushed; they made history by properly developing their vaccines in only one year. Jubilation!
So how can we possibly explain “vaccine hesitation” by literate adults worried the vaccine was “developed too quickly?” Easy: Because those people are just like today’s Calgary ex-police officer. He believes the vaccine “is experimental!” Could that man possibly have read the same newspapers as me? No. He only read social media. I wish he had read my T-shirt Social Media Kills.
For my pretty blond cousin, I would wish to be indirect, discouraging her viewing choice without directly refuting her sole choice of media. Maybe I could tease, “I own a computer too, but I don’t expect any science papers to be published on social media.”
I could be even more indirect by quoting the Boy Scout Handbook: “‘A Scout is wise in the use of his resources,’” adding “Scouts look to nature: The humble bat sends out sonar to use information from various directions. Yes cousin, that’s a metaphor. Don’t be afraid of the six o’clock news…”
The scientists know: Blonds and football players don’t have to be dumb.
…
…
Sean Crawford
Calgary
December,
2021
For all of the year 2021, this BBC News video looks at disinformation. It’s as if some people are willing to cause death for the sake of their joy of sharing a conspiracy. As one doctor said in a BBC fertility news story: (with a long list of social media fertility falsehoods) Every time we debunk one falsehood, the anti-vaxxers just “raise the bar” and come out with another.
Afterthoughts:
Conditioning isn’t easy to break free from: In the 1970’s believers in women’s liberation found it enormously helpful to converse, with the furniture in a circle, for “consciousness raising.” Update Jan 1, 2022: As for social mores, apparently the French in the 1940’s couldn’t admit (few medals) that half the WWII resistance workers were women. (link)
Classical Perspective: As for differences in consciousness levels, I think that’s a classic tragedy:
Seen today in the clash between well balanced Muslims who believe “Islam means peace” and Muslims of only one social media.
Seen three millennia ago when Homer began his poem about a leader, “…He failed to bring his men home, hard though he tried… (because his men, at a lower level of consciousness, slew a god’s oxen)
