A Stick, Chewing Gum, and a Mirror: Essential Social Media Tools

Keep your stick, chewing gum, and mirror handy

I took a beating the other night on Facebook. It wasn’t a big, nasty, knockdown sort of beating; it was more like a sucker punch in the gut beating. But, as one who was smacked by a pair of virtual brass knuckles, the butt of a gun argument, and one or two other saps and tire irons wielded by disgruntled haters who pretty much wore masks crafted to look like nice people, I was more than a little wounded in the heart and spirit. Once I admitted the pummeling to my FB friends, I was heartened by the outpouring of genuine kindness and advice I received within minutes of my confession. To my caring cadre of compañeros, I say thank you.

Most of us who have been using and/or watching Facebook for a few years can attest to a shift in how Facebook’s algorithms, news feed selections, friendship requests, and myriad technical and marketing things about which I know nothing, have taken the site from generally congenial to, in some sad instances, downright vicious and venal. It has become a portal for misinformation, disinformation, shouting, demonizing, plagiarizing, dehumanizing, and a dozen other “‘izings” that are not helpful or healthful to those in the community who still believe that posting kitten/puppy/pony/goats-in-coats/bird/heart-shaped clouds/misty morning pictures and birthday greeting GIFs and other celebratory shout-outs to the world are soporifics to an otherwise stressful world. Believe me, when I am in my blind taking bird pictures, I’m in a very good place. 

I think most of us have become sensitized to the need to look around the FB discussion corner with a mirror on a long stick—if you get my analogy (think Saving Private Ryan, a mirror and chewing gum)—before we poke our dialogue-seeking heads out to make a point about almost anything.

I’m one of those long-stick-and-mirror types; either what I see around the corner is safe enough to affirm that what awaits is open-mindedness toward the remarks I am thinking of sharing, or what I see in the mirror tells me all I need to know about the emotional violence that is awaiting me should I venture forth with my free speech. I don’t know how the rest of you gauge the possible outcome of the yes-I-will-no-I-won’t-step-around-the-corner decision, but for me, a touch of caution seems like a sane choice.

Unless you are willing to live in a cave, sans any form of media, or you simply have the enviable gumption to turn completely away from the news cycles spinning around like endless banks of laundromat dryers on crack, you have seen the descent of decency not only in social media, but in so many other quarters of our daily lives.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that life when I was growing up—with the Cleavers, the Nelsons, Gidget, and Father Knows Best living all on the same neatly-trimmed cul-de-sac—represented some sort of Halcyon days for Baby Boomers.

The televisions of the day were, compared to today’s HD monsters, laughably tiny, rough resolution, and mostly black and white. We had three, maybe four or five, channels we received with rabbit ear or rooftop antennae. We had news programs featuring real reporters, respected anchors (a relatively new term, by the way), and credible stories that lacked any bias or points of view that had the potential to set neighbor against neighbor.

There were, of course, radio and television commentators, and newspaper columnists who leaned left or right, and we knew that, but we didn’t let our personal affection for, or affiliation with, a news personality or a news company so blind us to the need for balance that we allowed wedges of disagreement to split us up as Americans. Oh, my father hated—railed against—the Washington Post—called it the Daily Pravda—and he preferred the Washington Star, a kinder, gentler paper, in his opinion.

But you know what? Both papers landed on our driveway every day, just as they did on the driveways of most of our neighbors. I have to say that there were media scoundrels and scourges…columnists with axes to grind, editorial cartoonists with sharp-tipped pens of poison…radio personalities who loved to hear the roar of their own nutty voices…and news organizations that were in one trench or the other during campaign seasons.

There were foes and fans of Huntley-Brinkley and Meet the Press. Same with Howard K. Smith and Sam Donaldson or, later, Peter Jennings. Barbara Walters took a huge beating for simply being a women brazen enough to earn a spot in front of a camera. And what about that National Enquirer and similar sensational rags?! Talk about fake news! But we knew it, and we did not have to tear each other apart to prove a point not even worth making.

When the daily lineup of television shows ended around eleven or midnight, some stations signed off with a “daily devotional” and then the National Anthem. I’m not being wistful here…I’m just saying that what was real for Americans back then was not corny or worthy of scorn or derision or some comparative analysis ending in the taking of unalterable sides. We also weren’t rubes about what was happening around us.

One only has to search through headlines of the major papers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s to see images of, and read stories about, racial violence, political corruption, social unrest, physical abuse (child and spousal), crude and demeaning objectification of women, drug abuse, school instability and segregation, inner-city blight, foreign entanglements, infrastructure woes, crime ranging from petty to mob-based, poverty, homelessness, veteran disenfranchisement, environmental pollution, corporate greed, and, of course, wars. We had the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, (Have you no sense of decency?”) for gosh’s sake, and the Charles Whitman University of Texas Tower shooting in 1966? All of these national ills were very much a part of my life and the lives of all my friends, without exception.

[A personal aside] For me and my Air Force family friends who lived in the Midwest on bomber bases surrounded by missile silos, or on Army posts in Germany near the Fulda Gap, or at Naval stations where submarine crews departed for months, we took life with a sort of gallows humor. During the Cold War, we knew that when the balloon went up (or the klaxons blared for real), our fathers would go away to do their jobs, and moms and kids might just as well step out on our lawns or balconies and wait for the bright flash that would end everything we knew. We didn’t worry about guns in school, and “duck and cover” wasn’t an option; we worried about life on earth as we knew it.

So where am I going with this backward-forward-sideways looking? I’m simply pointing out two things:

One. America has always had social, political, economic, and other systemic problems. From day one. We didn’t work them all out at once—it took a Declaration, a war, a Constitution, another war, a few bad presidents (one of whom whose goal was to eliminate an entire native-born population, and his picture is nonetheless hung right there in the Oval Office), a great president, a war, an assassination, a period of terrible decline and cultural and economic abuse, another war, several amendments, another war, more amendments, another war, and one more on top of that, then a colder war, an assassination, then a very hot war, then protests, then civil rights crises, more assassinations, a resignation, and on, and on, and on, with terrible tragedy at home, and more wars abroad. Democracy is messy, painful, frustrating, head-shaking, hurtful to some, unfair to others, ultimately unsatisfying in its details, but somehow satisfying in its totality, in its sheer persistence to not give up on the original idea.  

Two. Until the advent of social media and its apparent transformation into a digitized beast hammered out of an alloy of good intentions and hopeful technology, but now infected and tarnished by the detritus of the worst human motivations, Americans, for the most part, found a way to talk to each other about core issues without fear of shaming, without seeing posters of themselves spread large on public walls with hateful artwork and unspeakable words spattered across them.  We talked, we stated our positions, we disagreed, we argued, we discussed, we debated, we listened, and we either came together or we compromised. We rarely closed our minds and our hearts to honestly-held positions stated openly and innocently.

Our disagreements were often messy—no doubt. There was shouting, there was name-calling and there were hurtful things said and done. But we did not for a moment think to walk down the middle of a crowded street—the broad boulevard of American society—with a megaphone of hate, a bucket of poison, and a box of hate-smeared nails, and single out the person with whom we disagreed (and probably never met) and humiliate them, scourge them, crucify them on a cross of misbegotten electrons and then disappear into a coward’s world of anonymity and unaccountability.

“Oh really?” you counter. “What about the racism that permeated the American conversation for so many decades? What about segregated schools, ‘white-only’ signs, backs of busses, the Klan and the lynchings and Jim Crow and the deaths of civil rights marchers and bus riders? What about the Dreamers today; what about the millions of refugees fleeing the Hell of Syria; what about the homeless, the sick, the aged without care? Those all exist today. What have your platitudes and hand-wringings and scolding columns accomplished to end all of that?”

I know where you are going with this, and you have a long list of grievances that you think I have skimmed over or simply ignored. Your points are legitimate; your reading of history is correct; your assessment of our past and continued failings has merit.

Well, I can’t defend that list anymore than I can forget that when I was a boy I heard words used to describe Jews, Italians, the Irish, Mexicans, Poles, Central Europeans, Arabs, Japanese…that great population of the global community that didn’t look, act, pray, eat, or sound like “us.” And I did not stand up against that. I was too afraid to be honest with my shame. None of that was, is, or ever will be made right to the satisfaction of those so wounded or those who lost everything by such terribly inhumane deeds carried out by Americans. I cannot unring my own bell of inaction.

But I will tell you this, and I believe it to my very core: We must stop the shouting, the unyielding position-taking, the boastful lying, the wanton, blatant disregard for compromising negotiations, the winner-take-all STFU attitudes that permeate our social media and political atmosphere. If we cannot wipe the slate of hate clean and learn anew to speak in measured, respectful tones, using honest words, and attentive ears, we will never be able to address the great problems of our time, and the problems that will haunt our children and grandchildren.

I see Abraham Lincoln through his mystic chords of memory; I know what he was trying to tell us. And I hear the weeping of those better angels.