The biggest challenge is keeping focus. We are living in a time governed not so much by “debates” and “polarisation” as the outright denial of fact. Large parts of society are not so much “divided” as tearing themselves free from reality. The hardest thing is how to address that.
I have been thinking about this article a lot recently. It was praised for its nuance and balance but it omitted the huge issue for many around the race report - the report’s deliberate distortion of sources, often to the horror of those who were claimed as contributors.
https://twitter.com/observeruk/status/1378619357262049289
This is something I see constantly in British political discourse: the avoidance of huge and horrifying realities in the search for reassuring nuance. But a Government that lies to the electorate in the vast majority of its Facebook ads doesn’t want nuance. It wants domination.
Nuance and balance and reasonableness are attractive, because it's exhausting to live in a constant state of agitation. That's why "woke" is an insult: because paying attention to this constant erosion of freedoms is absolutely overwhelming. It's also absolutely necessary.
People know things are bad - that they are very bad - and people who are "woke" keep reminding them of that, often uncomfortably so. The grim thing is that there are very few effective ways of getting people to listen.
I think about these things a lot, especially when (as now) I am working out which new writing I want to start. And I think that we need more urgent language. I think that too many of us have been sugarcoating the horror of the moment to make it more palatable.
Part of me is afraid that the scale of what is happening is just too big for most people to engage with it. It's overwhelming, and so many of us are retreating into ourselves, heads down and holding ourselves close, as if passengers bracing for a crash.
I don't have any answers. But as @ProfDaveAndress notes, "normal is broken". All this talk of "debates" and "polarisation" obscures the fact that, in literal and metaphorical senses, the ice beneath us is melting. We need to find language to convey that urgency, and fast. /end
P.S. I actually think that to admit things are overwhelming is the beginning of a solution. It's brave and it's vulnerable, which is the complete opposite of the bluffing and posturing that got us here. Maybe it's the antidote.
https://twitter.com/DonegalDreaming/status/1379451460249878531?s=20
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