Futile Awakenings

 It’s been a while since I shouted at the nightly news while my husband is making dinner, or, howled during morning drive-time segments all alone in my car. 

“No one can't hear you,” my husband will chuckle at these fruitless attempts to counter whatever incredulity makes me fume. No doubt some outrage I might have assumed was satire if it wasn’t announced on a network that had once prided itself on reporting facts.

The headlines from papers of note that fulfill the wishes of a "Pitchbot" jokester:   

“President-elect Trump and his allies have spent four years trying to change the narrative around the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol. On "The Daily," our reporter talks to one of the rioters.“

Serious news is near-impossible to decipher in the modern moment.

Those days seem so far in the past, especially since journalists have turned into scolds reminding audiences they have an obligation to report “both sides.”

In the weeks since the election, I have stepped back from close reads and my usual media transfixation. So my silence is owing, in strong measure, to attrition.

Soon enough his voice will be everywhere again. The swollen vagaries whittled into downright lies with sharpened points. Nails in our collective coffins, We won’t be able to avoid it. 

But more than the annoyance of his continuous gushing stream and lack of conscience, it is the people around him who pose the most risk. 

People who already have the spotlight; people who have blinded us with the foolgold of big ideas.

Like Elon Musk, who, after backing the America-First guy, unabashedly bashes the talent and skills of American Workers, saying out loud that companies like his require international workers on limited visas; people who can’t quit and retain legal status. 

People like Mark Zuckerberg, who, on Tuesday, announced that his company, Meta, would end its TFG-era of professional fact-checking, trying to spin the ability to deceive as fundamental to free special. He even had the audacity to stake a claim that he formed his company to give people a voice. 

He must think we have forgotten his once lofty goal, creating Facebook for rating the appearance of women around campus. 

"We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content," Zuckerberg said. "The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Pandemic denialism leading to snake oil cures, political conspiracies sending armed rubes into family pizza shops, and other swindle-based threats against civil society draining life savings …. will flourish while the head honchos that dust their hands of moderating against chaos rake in spoils of its monetization. 

I don’t think we deserve a country that is cannibalizing itself because some folks realized the horror and called it out. 

The rest of us will need to wake up and realize the danger. We can’t avert our eyes forever.