Dear No One: the person you’re ranting to is you
One of the first rules of journalism is to know your audience. The first thing my husband said to me this morning is “it’s a bad news day.” It’s been a bad news day for a while. As his constant and captive audience, I knew what he was saying: the bad news is affecting people we know more today than perhaps other days.
As humans, we have to compartmentalize. Information overload is closer than ever — our phones and other devices are our windows into a world that’s treacherous to navigate in person. We ascribe priority to our fear and sadness and outrage in an attempt to not let it overwhelm us. Callous, yes, but a defense mechanism. As the adage goes, “you can’t pour from an empty cup.”
I started drafting a response to the bad news of the day and it got longer and longer until I moved it to a word processing document, and then, as it still went on, the editor in me asked, “who is your audience?”
It starts with me. Journaling is a way of working through your own thoughts, trying to make sense of them, and decide on action. It doesn’t go much further from there. Who cares what I have to say? In other words, when do I make the leap from journaling to journalism? Who is my audience?
Maybe people like me. Lame social justice warriors: privileged, disjointed, concerned for the rights and welfare of others yet afraid of losing our own comfortable way of life, and ranting into the void. Maybe the friends, family, and acquaintances who know me and trust my voice. More on that, later.
Today the message is having a message. The right, the responsibility, of a privileged person to enter the conversation. When to speak up, why, and what does it matter what we as individuals have to say?
I, myself, doubt the impact and efficacy of one Facebook post in the flood of opinions that fill our newsfeed. My words are less profound than they sound in my head and unlikely to affect a wide audience. Maybe they’ll resonate with one person, but they could also do more harm than good. Trolls in the comments, friendships that are broken. You start to wonder if opening yourself up to criticism is worth it.
I don’t love social media as a reporting platform because I believe in journalistic ethics and fact-checking. But it’s what we’ve got. The press as an institution is under threat and social media gives people a voice. We must work with what we’ve got.
The patriots of colonial America had to work with what they had. A disorganized militia of merchants and farmers using guerilla tactics against a formidable adversary. Did the colonists know they were living in a revolutionary moment? At any time you can say we’re “living history,” but there are times the stakes feel higher.
The threats are invisible: virus particles, institutional racism, economic inequality. It feels like they are closing in from everywhere. One of them is new. The others are old — older than the revolution fought and won by a disorganized but determined people with a haphazard approach. We must use what we have. So we have guerilla journalism.
The current struggle has been called a “war on truth.” Oscar Wilde said, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Is it Truth we’re fighting for, or is it people? As we strive for an outcome, we must concur on the ultimate goal. I believe it’s for equity. For all humans in the nation to enjoy the ideals and rights we are supposedly afforded by being citizens of this nation: life, freedom of reasonable action and thought, and the means to preserve our lives and way of life.
Even these rights are subjective. An even more hotly debated subject in the era of masks and social distance. To keep moving I summarize thusly: your right to reasonably live your life the way you see fit in your domicile — and the resources to do so — up until it affects someone else’s equal right to reasonably live their life the way they see fit in their equally appointed domicile with access to equal resources to support their lifestyle. We all need food, shelter, stories. Basic stuff, low to middle-triangle on Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s not happening like that.
People on the ground are telling how their lives and freedoms are under threat in specific, up-to-the-minute detail. This is the benefit of social media. The ability to describe virus symptoms as patients are suffering them or to break down the play-by-play of a protest. We need to listen. One voice can be spoofed. One account could be a bot. The journalistic integrity is on us, now.
Cross-reference. This is what my generation of young scholars was taught as we moved from paper references to internet sources. One Wikipedia page does not a fact make. Look for multiple sources — multiple voices — in agreement. One person writing a post about a fire in the neighborhood can be faked, but if the whole block is reporting the same story, we give it more credence.
It’s amazing how much this health threat has set us back. Even with the wonders of modern medicine, we cannot treat without knowledge. Like early physicians, the first responders are playing a dangerous guessing game. It’s all they can do. We must go back to basics. In the case of COVID-19, that means distance and physical barriers. In the case of news, that means word-of-mouth.
Talking about bad news gets exhausting, but we must remain active in the conversation. In a digital world where at any time your friend across the country could get hacked, voices are crucial. If we can’t meet face-to-face, we must at least connect with people we trust, on a trustworthy platform, and listen to their experiences.
It’s a flawed system — a game of literal telephone — but so is the mainstream media, so is any communication, full of noise and bias. We must listen to many different voices and decide for ourselves. Find the subtext and determine the most urgent needs of the people, of marginalized people, of the most vulnerable among us.
In his book The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life, Ira Byock recounts the story of a student asking Margaret Mead what was the very first sign of human society. Mead reportedly said “a healed femur,” as it demonstrated “that someone cared for the injured person…the first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.”
For all its flaws, anthropology dispels the myth that we are solitary beings, better off in competition. A study of history— and the admittedly very subjective concept of progress — shows that society shines with cooperation. Ideally, this would come from collaboration for its own sake, but often this results from the fight of a common enemy. As Ben Franklin said, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
We are not in the “same boat,” we never have been. Whether that boat is a metaphor for houses, economic situation, or life experience, we each pilot our own vessel. We are, as saying goes, in the same ocean — that is, in a connected world where our actions definitively affect others and we are all beholden to each other. When I say the people, it comes down to this.
What is best for the oldest, poorest, least fortunate must be best for all, for society hangs on healed femurs. Listen to the marginalized voices, whether they ring out on Twitter or the evening news. Cross-reference those voices with others, in your neighborhood and in the nation. Keep the conversation active and alive.
The colonists were flawed, disorganized, tired, and afraid. Civil rights leaders were and are tired, angry, and human. We celebrate the revolutionaries past who proclaim the ideal of compassion, who realize this central concept binds us. You are exhausted, fearful, angry, and imperfect. The odds seem against us, the threats insurmountable. What can a high-risk immunocompromised individual do from her own home when she feels her most powerless?
Listen.
Media coverage is wildly uneven. What is important and newsworthy is subjective. But everyone has a voice. Listen to the people on the ground, those on the “front lines,” whether they are first responders to the pandemic or the oppressed speaking up for justice. Listen before you speak. Hear those affected before adding your own voice.
Trust.
Faith in others is earned through shared experience. Be open to all information but prioritize trusted sources, especially from those you know personally, or who have demonstrated integrity. Be the investigative journalist, put on your Lois Lane pencil skirt. It’s on you.
Share.
Not just a button on your social media feed. Providing monetary (and even participatory) resources is crucial but difficult right now. It’s easy to think “I can’t support an organization financially, I can’t go out and volunteer, so I’m useless, there’s nothing I can do.” Defeatism really is nothing. Change on a small scale is not pointless. Give time and attention to important causes. Talk about them, learn about them. Share verified information with your circle, however small.
Intelligence wins wars, in every sense of that word. No increment of it is insignificant. We tend to think of free speech as a grandiose concept affecting major networks and federal policies, but it is a part of every conversation — especially those not recorded on the internet for posterity eternal.
The American Revolution began as whispers in taverns. For all the quotes and wisdom we have from founding fathers, from abolitionists and suffragists, there were more words meant only for a small audience, to bend one ear or two. On your bad news days, keep the conversation going. Talk becomes a plan; the plan becomes action.
Write your fears and indignations, the injustices that you see, and those that others report. If you don’t talk about them, people will forget that they happened — especially those not directly affected. Write your hopes, solutions for inequity, and what you want to achieve. If you don’t have a goal, you will never get started. Talk about your flaws, your privilege, what you need to work on, and do better. Acknowledging failings is the first step in fixing them.
Use your voice, even if the audience is just yourself. That’s where all change needs to start. Just don’t stop there. Nouns and adjectives can be a persuasive beginning, but the result must be realized in verbs. Make good on your promises. The scale will likely be small to start. Talk, go, support, share, volunteer, do.
I’m not screaming into the void to hear my own echo. I’m informing my reflection so that, with some improvement, I become happy with who I see.
The person who needs to hear my rant about everything wrong with the world and what we need to do to fix it is me.
