Sunday's Cool: May the Tweets I Roast Light the Way
We don't have to pick between fighting injustice and living a beautiful life.
“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
Annie Dillard wrote that in The Writing Life and it’s a quote that chases me around all day every day like an annoying kid who won’t stop asking questions. “Is this how you want to spend your life? Your one wild beautiful precious life?”
The answer, the past few weeks, has been “yes,” with a notable exception that I’ll get to. I prefer Thanksgiving with my family, but Liz and I had a wonderful time with a little group of renegade expats here in Paris, and we managed a full blown turkey, mac and cheese, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie dinner. It was so fun. I spent my birthday on a short trip over to Germany, which I’d never been to and it was very beautiful. Insofar as this is how I’m spending my life, no regrets.
The notable exception is a problem of my own making, and I’m afraid it has to do with posting. Scrolling through my own tweets has been an ugly experience over the last few days. Not because I necessarily regret anything I’ve said, but rather that I regret how much of my life I’ve been giving to characters unworthy of it.
Between the awful horror in Colorado Springs, the embarrassing Christian Nationalist display of the last few days, the rapid mainstreaming of explicit antisemitism and Elon Musk’s ongoing digital empire disaster, there is a lot of stuff to be very justifiably mad about out there right now. Posting is a natural way to vent that anger, but that natural urge gets filtered through various quirks of the Corporate Media Age to include some unnatural nuances. I not only feel mad, I feel pressure to stir others to anger. I end up amplifying the worst voices in the world as a way of showing everyone just how bad some people can be. I get involved in “I know you are, but what am I?” levels of digital jousting matching with Nazi trolls.
And all of this can be justified as “activism.” I’m not just posting. I’m raising awareness! I’m fighting injustice! I’m correcting misinformation! If I don’t say it, who will? This may be true as far as it goes but given that Twitter is a tiny digital neighborhood inhabited, as far as my algorithm is concerned, primarily with people who think more or less like I do, it doesn’t go very far.
So what, then? Should we not post about bad things? Not express grief, outrage, fury, frustration at the infernal forces of greed and bigotry coalescing to make modern life ever more unlivable for all but a select few rich, powerful clowns? Tempting, perhaps. Especially for those of us who, by the luck of a few privilege draw points, aren’t feeling particularly threatened by a rise in homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian hatred, the wealth gap, etc. But that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that we, all of us, have a finite amount of energy for this work, and the internet is among the least effective places to deploy that energy.
What’s troubling is how Corporate Media has duped so many of us into believing that posting is the entirety of the fight, that liberation can be achieved with enough tweets or Tiktoks or whatever. At my worst, I effectively operate as if I’m sitting over here practicing magic spells on my keyboard and, if I get them right, they’ll banish injustice back to the Shadow Dimension. Wouldn’t that be nice.
But I’m not writing magic spells and, if I’m being honest, I don’t even want to spend my time coming up with hilarious dunks for MAGA chuds. I want to write beautiful things that illuminate, inspire, encourage and fortify us to be good people in hard times. I’m not really interested in feeding the internet ouroboros. The best online writing I’ve read was the stuff that helped me lead a better life offline.
This is why I’m feeling a little more charitable to irl acts of resistance that, at first blush, came across a little cringe. I still don’t think defacing classic art is the best way to raise awareness about the climate change disaster, but it is at least a protest that takes place in the real world. “THEIR IS BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. FIVE LIVES TAKEN.” may not strike some as a civil attempt at discourse, but at least it confronts Focus on the Family with a message that can’t be algorithm’d away or dismissed as eastern european bots.
Among the many things I appreciated about Andor was its depiction of these tangible displays of resistance under fascism, how small acts of courage, community, tradition, kinship and, yes, anger are themselves protest. Luthen may be proud of making his life a “sunless place” for the sake of the Rebellion, but the Daughters of Ferrix broke the backs of their Imperial overlords by living as they wanted as an act of protest, not making themselves miserable for the greater good.
And that brings me back to the Dillard quote. “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” I want to spend my life doing good and helping others do good. Some of that means activism, sacrifice, protest and disruption. But some of that also means hosting Thanksgiving, loving your friends well, running errands for neighbors, making music and art, spending time in fervent prayer, having good sex, cultivating fulfilling hobbies, navigating healthy conflict, all the things that make up a beautiful life. And with a little intentionality, we can see that living well and fighting injustice are not oppositional energies. The beautiful tradition of protest includes dance, church and play. Getting married, going to school and making movies have all struck blows against fascism.
The fires we set can both burn bridges and light the way. They are branches of the same tree, growing ever upward, spreading outward, providing shade for others to do the same, until the world is one great forest.
It’s Christmastime! My annual Christmas mix is live on Spotify.
I’m late to Vince Mancini’s very good essay “In Defense of Having Opinions,” but I liked it a lot. That’s just my opinion!
I linked to this story a few weeks ago when the Washington Post covered it. Now the New York Times is tackling the same story with some fresh information, and it remains just as gobsmackingly horrific, especially for Christians. The U.S. Army orphaned a baby and then a Marine
surprise adoptedkidnapped her from her Afghan family and is now raising her as his own. It’s nightmare upon nightmare.
Absolutely love this.