On Sparking Dumpster Fires
The general consensus across the Twittersphere with regard to Trump supporters goes like this: they are morons … Hillary was correct to call them deplorables … these are the dregs of our society.
Whole lotta truth here. The problem falling by the wayside for a myriad of reasons is that the percentage of people for which this provides an accurate description and the percentage of people that fall under the label “Trump supporter” are divergent.
What we must understand … and work to eliminate … is the why. For some f$&king reason … too many f$&king people are squaring their perceived reality with an acceptance that our societal dregs have blossomed into 49% of our populace. I am still not sure how they are squaring the ease with which millions in this nation have found it totally f$&king plausible for there to be a shadowy, high power cabal drinking up babies in pursuit of immortality.
The degradation of journalistic credibility, the rise of outright like-you-learned-it-in-school propaganda being fed to our nation like news (but let off the hook as entertainment), the degree to which social media has supplanted traditional news in our information ecosystem, the bifurcation of our information ecosystem into two unbridgeable dualing reality echo chambers … these things are what one needs to spark the dumpster fire within which we find ourselves.
I can count on two hands the number of people I have come across with appreciation for this. The hand count drops to one when we refine our set to include people who realize that this ecosystem must be deconstructed should we hope to regain the ground we have lost … to perhaps progress further than we have previously been. Those within reach must be deprogrammed. Those unreachable must be drowned out.
I haven’t yet found a single soul interested in helping me work out how this might be achieved. How we might merge our echo chambers so that we might once again share a collective voice. There must be a return to civil discourse or the fabric of our society shall unravel past the point of patching. We must all inhabit a common reality should we ever hope to find common ground. The rage is properly placed but progress would require more of us … and … at the very least … it will certainly require we understand how the fire started.