Many of us were saddened recently to hear the news that both Carrie Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds had passed away in the final week of 2016, a year that seemed cursed by the deaths of a disproportionately high number of celebrities, athletes, and politicians. From David Bowie’s passing in January to the deaths of Alan Rickman, Nancy Reagan, Fidel Castro, Antonin Scalia, Shimon Peres, Arnold Palmer, Muhammad Ali, and many others, the past twelve months have seen us lose countless influential public figures at an astonishing rate.
Meanwhile, wars continued to rage in Syria and Yemen as conflicts festered across the Middle East and genocide loomed in South Sudan while divisive, nationalist politics prevailed in developed democracies. With Trump yet to take office and Britain’s exit from the E.U. yet to take effect, the world seems braced for the uncertainty of what will come next on a variety of fronts. With nuclear arsenals around the world modernized and tensions enflamed, the atomic doomsday clock remains at three minutes to midnight – its most precarious position since the height of the Cold War in 1984.
As the holidays inevitably bring us together (for better or worse) and tend to inspire bold declarations of (often hastily abandoned) New Year’s resolutions, they seem a worthy point of reflection on the rapidly degenerating state of our discourse. Many of us have likely found ourselves disheartened as we watch our friends, colleagues, and former classmates spew angry, often bitterly personal rhetoric at one another on social media. If we’re being honest, many of us have also participated in these vitriolic arguments and said things that our more level-headed selves came to regret. Maybe this is the consequence of being so plugged in, all day, every day. After all it’s impossible to know what George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt would have posted on a whim in the wee hours of the morning, right? Perhaps they would have been even more prolific tweeters than our current President-elect, well Teddy maybe…George, probably not so much.
Whatever it is that makes us so prone to impulsive decisions when sitting behind a keyboard, whether it’s our fault or not, we should at least agree that we might be taking things a little too far. As the comedian Louis C.K. once observed “When I’m in my car, I have a different set of values. I am the worst person I can be.” Commenting on the oddly overwhelming degree to which people seem to succumb to road rage, losing all sense of the humanity of other drivers when behind the wheel of a car, Louis raises a point that seems applicable to social media as well. Keeping this in mind, it would seem a worthy consideration going into the new year to try our best to remember the human on the other side of the screen before we hit return.
A recent USC study found that “when political beliefs are challenged, a person’s brain becomes active in areas that govern personal identity and emotional responses to threats”, so let’s try to be more self-aware of our emotional reactions whenever someone bursts the unique bubble we all create for ourselves in the safe spaces of our own news feeds. Regardless of whether you want to say 'black lives matter' or 'blue lives matter', whether you want to ‘make America great again’ or you were ‘with her’, we should all be a little more mature and ought to lower our pitchforks just enough to let each other get a word in edgewise - we just might learn something a a result. Whatever ‘side’ we like to think we’re on, we could all use a little bit of compassion and goodwill heading into a year with so much uncertainty ahead.
