Greg Storey blogging about how much we’ve divided ourselves and what we’ve lost:
When we don’t talk to each other, we stop trusting each other. When we stop trusting each other, we stop trusting anything —ballots, elections, basic facts. And when we lose trust, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.
@manton I have trouble with the “we” in this. Who am I (a ballot-trusting, election-believing, fact-supporting person) supposed to talk to? Or is this “we” the polite way of saying one side in order to not be mean to the one side?
@bobschulties My reading of “we” here is just society broadly, not a specific group. We are drawn to people who agree with us (understandably!) and to news that confirms what we believe (less good), and this isolates us and makes misinformation less likely to be corrected. Solving this is hard, though.
@manton See, I get tripped up here because it’s so incredibly close to “both sides have a problem,” when, clearly, one side is up to, to say it nicely, a lot of shenanigans. You know, “We need to stop attacking the Capitol” or “We need to stop being antisemitic.”
I’m happy to listen to others about, let’s say, economic models, but I’m not going to engage in why certain people can’t be in certain places or why vaccines are bad (as some examples). Or, incredibly, about where Obama was born.
@bobschulties Yeah, I agree with that… It’s basically too late when we’re at the point where people are attacking the Capitol. I’m thinking more like: how did some people get so trapped in a bubble that they actually believed lies? Would it have helped if we had been talking to our Trump-y neighbors? I don’t know.
@manton I’m not blaming TV (OK, maybe some, especially the propaganda stuff), but I remember during the last blackout we had (2003?) where everyone ended up outside all talking to one another. Cooking food before it went bad, sharing everything since it was going to be tossed otherwise. It was a grand time. When the power came back on, everyone went back inside. But I am struck by the “we” almost universally being the right/Trump-y. It’s never “I should have talked to my liberal neighbors about their universal caring about others” or “I can’t believe Mike bought a hybrid when he could have bought a pickup truck! I’ll have to have a talk with him about it.”
