Hopeless Place
Sep. 13th, 2021 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
paserbyp
A lot of people thought this summer would be great, but most people seem totally fried and at loose ends instead — expectations keep getting subverted, and anger keeps flowing into the void. There’s the kind of sudden, violent anger that ranges from embarrassing to disturbed to unruly to racist: Everybody’s seen the videos of people screaming on flights or in stores; fighting in airports, parking lots, and at baseball games; and punching older Asian American people. Everyone knows that sort of pre-thunder, static crackle that announces people stepping outside the normal bounds of behavior in your vicinity. In the grim year 2021, the Federal Aviation Administration has so far reported 4,090 cases of unruly passengers, 2,999 of them mask-related, which have produced 727 investigations and 143 enforcement measures. The trajectory of the increase over last year is steep.In the antiseptic language of the FAA’s press releases, you can feel the vivid misery of these flights: for instance, the passenger fined $45,000 “for allegedly throwing objects, including his carry-on luggage, at other passengers; refusing to stay seated; lying on the floor in the aisle, refusing to get up, and then grabbing a flight attendant by the ankles and putting his head up her skirt.” Or the passenger Southwest banned from future flights for, according to the FAA, “allegedly assaulting passengers around him because someone in his row would not change seats to accommodate his travel partner.” The monthly releases from the FAA are filled with five-figure fines and allegations of obscenities, assaults, middle fingers in faces, and flight attendants holding ice mallets to defend themselves.
And then there’s the online anger. This kind is easiest to write about because it flips what happens inside the brain into something tangible: posts, with quantifiable metrics. You know those days on Twitter or Instagram where it’s like trying to stand on the ocean: one wrong move and you’re dragged down into a spiral of outrage and bitterness, whether ambient or building inside your head, whether it’s the deepest and realest kind of outrage, or something you won’t remember tomorrow. With fewer outlets and more isolation, this kind of anger has seemed more unpredictable during the pandemic. It’s hard to tell, though, if that’s the false impression given by recency, or the objective truth derived from a time in which there was a lot to be angry about.
For years, people have put forth various theories about why social platforms and online life induce rage: that context collapse strips out intentions and histories; that Twitter (in particular) elevates “paranoid” readings over “reparative” readings of those intentions; that there just are some real jackasses out there and we hear from more of them now; that grief and sadness are just manifesting as anger; that the entire enterprise of social media dehumanizes the individual such that people become so distant they might as well be fictional. Under that last condition, rage becomes inevitable: You have to fight to be recognized. Hatred, the Brooklyn Nets forward and chaotic Twitter user Kevin Durant told the New York Times, “is just another form of passion, and therefore a sign that you’re really alive.”
On some level, anger is the things taken or denied — the subversion of expectations, even and especially if those expectations come from some warped place, or at the existential cruelty of the entire machine denying basic humanity to the individual. That’s very old, and you can find moral anger in Aristotle, or the basic expectations example of Christ mad at the disciples for falling asleep in the garden in the Bible. I think we all know that electric tension radiating off the raw nerve from elsewhere in your mind onto the present situation — the way it was supposed to be, or the way it never has been but always should’ve been — and its compulsive, spiraling nature. Right now, the entire country remains in an entirely warped place, with expectations continually subverted.
You can come up with dozens of root problems and ones specific to this time that seem plausible for various kinds of rage that we see right now:
* that not enough people in this country have gotten the vaccine, and that inescapable fact and how to resolve it dominates our lives;
* that many hundreds of thousands of people have died early, and many people’s jobs changed or disappeared for some period of time;
* that the level of fear and wild hope that preceded the vaccine’s authorization occupied a lot of collective space, and when the optimism went somewhat unrealized, anger flowed into a vacuum;
* that some drink too much at ballgames and before flights;
* that some treat wage workers and service employees with a base level of contempt that can spiral out of control;
* that this is a country of automated processes that don’t work;
* that the breakup of centralized media has good and bad elements to it, but it makes it harder to understand the basic narrative of reality;
* that Donald Trump gave supporters and critics a shove in the direction of anger somewhere around the fall of 2015;
* that the CDC and a lot of the national media could, frankly, be better at communicating public health news;
* that isolation makes it tougher to understand yourself;
* that things are just bad now;
* that this has always been an angry country, in all the worst ways, and you need no more proof than how common it was for white people to pull guns on or bomb young Black women registering people to vote, or taking a close look at the experience of Italian and Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century;
* that this has always been an angry country, in all the moral ways, from the original conception of liberties unrecognized to injustice at rights unfulfilled.
With the sheer connectivity and externalization of interior emotion in the 21st century, there’s probably a sharper awareness of the grand totality of angers flowing around at any given moment, and what it’s like to feel, get indicted by, or caught up in them. The social platforms give us this neon cat’s-in-the-cradle paradigm where you can see how X leads to Y, and pulling here tightens this over there. Whatever problems existed before the pandemic, they just seem to have been frozen in time and deepened, along with all the new iterations. And from a distance, one can stoically observe the ways that X or Y from this time will linger and metastasize, like dropping tiny alarm clocks into the heart and razors into the circulatory system, slicing into and nipping away at the frayed edges of people’s minds.
In this totally busted version of how two years on this Earth ought to have gone, it is incredibly easy, like the bang-bang-bang of an old Britney Spears song coming into clarity, to get angry inside your heart about literally anything big or small interfering with the establishment or restoration of a cohesive life, free from these added complications, things that don’t even have to do with the pandemic and never will. This summer was supposed to be great, and it was supposed to move in a linear direction, instead of schismatically looping forward and backward, and for this to just feel like a state that will never end. “It’s lasted too long,” as one character says late into The Plague. “All the time’s one’s wanting to let oneself go, and then one day one has to.”
And we all know those people and sometimes become them, where it’s like, do you hear yourself, do you see yourself and yet, here you stand not seeing or hearing your own life in the context of society. And, of course, can I hear myself, can I see myself — they are not lost years, we are alive and some of us blessed, and many problems could be addressed with incremental and temporary measures within the indefinite and unequal ruin that is this pandemic.
But nobody wants that! Everybody wants this to be over — and, more than anything, in the historical trajectory of the last decade, to not revisit this in a year or five and think: if I only knew then what was to come.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 09:10 pm (UTC)