It’s Gettin’ Better, Man!
Broken iPods, Poop Swastikas, and Red Herrings
The other day, I was fiddling with my ancient iPod, wondering why it wasn’t holding a charge and worrying that our union might be coming to an end.
I thought back to when I bought it, six years ago, in a shop on the island of Menorca.
Jeez. That’s not that long! I have a record player that’s still working, and it was built in, like, 1953!
From there, I went down a mental path that’s familiar to anyone who’s seen a late-model Clint Eastwood movie: the one where I decried the state of things, shaking a theoretical fist at the theoretical neighbor kids while I all but yelled at them to get off my lawn, wanting to shout things like,
“Nothing’s worth a damn anymore!”
I was behaving like a shortsighted fool, just like a lot of people I see on the Internet — assuming that everything is awful because of one example.
When, in fact, the very opposite just might be the truth.
A few months ago, a scandal erupted on the campus of the University of Missouri. There were charges that, at Missouri, at least, racism was alive and well. One of the harbingers of this dreadful behavior was a poop swastika that had been crafted out of human feces on a bathroom wall.
It is possible that brutal and destructive racism is alive and well on the campus of the University of Missouri. And it is possible that the poop swastika was indeed the mark left by someone intent on bringing back the bad old days of the Confederacy.
But it is also possible that the poop swastika was drawn by someone who was drunk, or by someone who was making a bad joke, or by someone who was, in fact, saying that Nazis are made of poop. (I don’t know about you, but when I craft symbols out of feces, it’s usually for things I don’t like.)
The poop swastika wasn’t the whole story and very well could have been a red herring: a warning of something that wasn’t really there.
One doesn’t have to look far to find similar instances of someone hoping to make a point using specious evidence as proof of a larger trend. This is especially easy on Twitter, which democratizes the appearance of our utterances such that they all look official.
Tweets that probably should have been scrawled in Sharpie above a club bathroom…
…look the same as Tweets that probably should be carved in stone…
This formatting issue doesn’t just apply to Twitter. It applies to the Internet, generally.
And now anyone can point to one of these Tweets or status updates or official-looking blog posts as proof that civilization has gone off the rails.
Take the recent #makerapelegal brouhaha, which first came to my attention thanks to — you guessed it — a Tweet. A rather breathless one, I might add, by someone who wrote that she assumed that groups of men were soon going to be roaming the streets, raping women.
After reading that Tweet (which I will not link because I don’t want to participate in exactly that which I decry), I was alarmed enough to do a little digging.
When I read the blog post that had caused the uproar, it seemed pretty clear to me that its author was advancing an absurdist argument in order to make a point. In poor taste, perhaps, and especially so considering recent events in Germany.
But also probably unlikely to be evidence that the Apocalypse is nigh here in the U.S.
What gives me the confidence to say all this?
Teaching.
Twice a week, I teach creative writing and reading comprehension at the Police Orientation and Preparation Program, or POPP.
POPP is a joint endeavor of the Los Angeles Police Department, West LA College, and the LA Unified School District, created (largely thanks to a woman named Roberta Weintraub) in order to train better candidates for the police academy.
Students usually enter POPP after their junior years of high school, and leave the two-year program with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree in criminal justice, and placement at the top of the candidate list for the academy itself.
Most of my students are Latino and all of them come from fairly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, some from intact families; some from broken ones. But what’s most germane here is their overall outlook, especially as that outlook regards race and gender and all the things that sometimes set the Internet afire.
My students come almost exclusively from public schools in Los Angeles County, so they’ve spent their lives amongst a wide array of cultures. And I don’t just mean the simple ones that governments use to classify us — rigidly locked in as Hispanic, Black, or White. I’m talking about the Benetton ad that gets created naturally in this part of the world — Salvadoran kids and Guatemalan kids and half-black, half-Mexican kids alongside a girl whose father is Irish but who talks like she’s Ice Cube.
This exposure results in students who use English when the joke would be best in English, who use Spanish when the joke would be best in Spanish, who listen to Kendrick Lamar AND Los Tigres del Norte, and who think it’s a little weird that I won’t let them use the N-word in group names because they’ve been so steeped in black culture that that word has lost all meaning to them.
My class is 60% male, but I’ve observed no resentment when female students take charge of a room, a group, or a squad. In fact, most of my students seem to think this is the natural order of things; of course Group Member X, who happens to be female, is speaking for us. She’s the most organized, the most articulate, the funniest; we’d be crazy to have anyone else!
They are hopeful and they are optimistic and, sure, that optimism and that hope could be put down to youthful naïveté or the ease with which racial harmony is realized when your ethnic group is already overrepresented in a particular area. (Los Angeles County is 49% Hispanic.)
But if we’ve learned nothing else from coverage of Election 2016, we’ve learned this: American demographics are changing, and quickly.
And I think my students represent what that changed America looks like — a brownish place that just isn’t as worried about or frightened by the race- and gender-based bugaboos their predecessors spent so much time wringing their hands over.
Why, then, do we — those predecessors — keep insisting that the opposite is true?
I think it’s because humans are creatures of habit. We utilize rituals for the sake of efficiency. Sometimes, this works pretty well for us: we brush our teeth every night, right before we go to bed, so we don’t have to think about when to brush our teeth.
Other times, it doesn’t work so well, like when we fall into familiar — but destructive — thought patterns. Maybe we deal with break-ups by going on benders. Maybe we shy away from deadlines by procrastinating with housework.
Or maybe, when we see a picture or read a Tweet or a scan a blog post that scares us, we fail to recall that this picture or Tweet or post might be a very isolated incident, that most people are decent, that it is possible that they are getting decent-er, and that if we would just engage with the world a little more, we’d probably be reminded of this.
Just like me, with my iPod.
When I noticed that my iPod was failing, I went down a familiar mental path: to the record player that wasn’t broken. It felt GOOD to assume that music delivery was better before. It felt GOOD to romanticize the past. It felt GOOD to overlook the fact that the very advent of the iPod has brought me all sorts of joy, and that the iPod is far more complicated than the record player, and that, I don’t know, maybe it’s just my iPod that’s broken, and maybe not all iPods are like this.
I took this path because it was close, because it was easy to find, because I’ve been down it before.
Because it was a habit.
But the thing about habits is that sometimes they need changing, especially when there is all sorts of evidence that agrees.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be mindful of and vigilant toward injustice. (Or worried about our dying iPods.)
It is to say that we are allowed to take a deep breath and remember that things might not be as bad as they seem on our screens.
That they are — as the notoriously optimistic Liam Gallagher (wink) once sang — gettin’ better, man.
