The Uncivil War - Is There a Path Forward for America?

Guys, I'm really floopin' proud of this one.

May I present, ‘The Uncivil War’: a home-recorded political beat poem 7 years in the making that I finally found inspiration to complete.  

I don't know if this is a good idea socially. I'm not sure if it helps or makes things worse for my local political climate. It probably doesn't do anything. But I'm sick of staying silent as violence and division escalate around me - I want to broadcast my voice into the ether while I still have it.

So here I go a'castin':

As someone with inherent left-wing proclivities raised in a conservative family, I find myself caught between two worlds. I'm appalled by much of what I see on the right these days, but also notice how the left often dips its toes into hypocrisy in a path to hell through good intentions kind of way.

Needless to say, political conversations with folks on either side of the aisle are tough for me.

I want to use my background to be a voice of unity, of identifying a throughline between parties. But in practice I've found this just doesn't work.

My debates with others become (best case) semi-civil conversations where both sides walk away unchanged and feeling that they won or (worst case, and much more likely) a bitter escalation that devolves into vitriol, disgust, and hurt feelings. 

I'm discovering more and more that honest debate may not be the way forward. That it's not the cure for our troubled times.

Political differences have always been around - so have moral irreconciliations across party lines. Those are not what led us here.

The dilemma of our modern age is that technology pushed those differences front and center. It made them ubiquitous.

Democracy dies in darkness, but perhaps it's also blinded by too much light.

The Internet has ensnared us in echo chambers, algorithmically submerging us into a sea of our own beliefs that pulls us under again each moment we open our eyes, stretch out our arms, and reach for that little black mirror on the nightstand.

The Internet is a blooming, invasive garden of confirmation bias.

Whatever crazy shit you believe, there is someone out there peddling rational-sounding and carefully selected facts online to justify it. Anything. Everything. To make matters worse, social media is swarmed with ill-intentioned bots, outrage-elevating algorithms, and now AI deepfakes that confuse the hell out of your grandmother - they'll get you soon too.

All this leads to the truth of where we stand today...

Objective reality is dead, and Zuckerberg killed it.

Our defense against bollocks since the dawn of America has always been experts and institutions, but even those have gone the way of the Diddy.

We need them back.

The world is complicated, we need trusted thought leaders to do the due diligence for us in specialized areas like science, economics, education, and journalism. No one has time to be Einstein. But over the last few decades we've lost faith in institutions, and justifiably so.

COVID taught us that leading scientists will omit inconvenient truths or push guesswork as fact in the name of public safety, or at least their vision of it. Universities, the bedrock of civilization, have become politicized and corporatized to a point of utter incompetence. And journalism has been tribalized into blindness - oftentimes lobbied or clout-swept into reporting what's lucrative, not what's true.

Worse, the erosion of our societal foundations is exacerbated by the Internet and a Post-COVID world driven indoors and away from local communities.

*Enter elevated anxiety, depression, and the normalization of anti-social behavior.*

Don't get me wrong, I cherish my hybrid work-life balance, but community is where we used to go to realize the people around us aren't as crazy as we think they are - even if their Facebook tirade on snorting Ivermectin to cure cancer was batshit.

We live within solitary, anxiety-inducing virtual siloes longing to belong and finding our fix in ideology and outrage, tossing tiny strands of homegrown kindling to the swirling, fiery hellstorm.

Can we recover from this?

Can we establish a clear vision for the future despite all our differences? Can we revive objective reality from the ashes like a zombified phoenix? Can institutions find a way to restore our trust in them and maintain it through consistent acts of non-partisan, incorruptible wisdom?

The honest answer is I'm not sure.

Things are bad, perhaps too far gone. But so long as the heart of America still beats I refuse to give up.

This country has given me everything, the chance to follow dreams, to be elevated by the passions and earned talents of others, to be an individual as well as a member of a community, to believe what I choose to believe - not what's forced on me.

I don't want see this country implode from the same technology that brought us cat videos.

There are ideas on the table: A shift from ad-based social media to identity-dependent subscription models that mitigate emphasis on outrage and trolldom. A blockchain-enabled Internet where deepfakes and bot misinformation are earmarked and eliminated (albeit at the expense of privacy). A grassroots push for community involvement and the revival of the wild idea to spend time outdoors.

Or perhaps a pseudo-messianic political figure will emerge from the woodwork and win the hearts of all Americans, leading us into a bright and glorious utopian future.

That would be pretty neat, wouldn't it?

I won't be holding my breathe, and in the meantime I'm making the following promises to myself:

1. I won't post or debate politics unless it's in the interest of bringing the country together or restoring a shared objective reality. Anything to the contrary is pointless and incendiary.

2. I will do my best to see both sides of every story, knowing that the looking glass of modern media strategically enrages us, keeping in mind that folks on the other side are never as cruel or crazy as they're made out to be.

3. The only way I'll give up hope for this country is if that hope is ripped from my hands.

4. I will go outside more.

Cheers y'all, hope you enjoy, and feel free to DM or leave a comment below!