Sucked in by stupid, held down by despair

“Life’s short; make sure you spend as much time as possible on the Internet arguing with strangers about politics.”

Someone posted this somewhere (don’t ask me where; everything runs together these days), yet another witticism that flickers for an instant and then is expunged by the wind of the next. I’m not sure we ever could have appreciated the brilliance of an Oscar Wilde or a Dorothy Parker in the current age; their words got to reverberate for generations, yet the fact that we still quote them stands for something, I guess. Mostly I see their words misappropriated, misattributed or flat out stolen; it’s a world that takes everything as fact and investigates nothing.

We are lazy.

Our current political climate has me twisting into small knots on a daily basis. Our public offices are knee-deep in incorrigible liars, buttressed by sycophants dumbly agreeing to everything with a straight face because, it seems, backstopping an idiot will keep them closer to money and power, and what else matters?

I get sucked into social media platforms because I erroneously think I’m plugging into some form of engagement when in reality, it’s more like I’m pulling the pin on my own sanity. I’ve started a new routine: on weekends, I run around buying newspapers and every time I would have otherwise opened my computer to fall down a rabbit hole, I do crosswords instead.

My mother did a crossword every day and, as I grew up, I used to help. Initially, this would mean when she put it aside, I’d pencil in random letters that I was still just learning. She didn’t scold, but instead helped me learn. To this day, as I fill in the spaces, it is in her hand. For as much as my own handwriting is illegible, somehow my penmanship in those tiny squares is a mirror of hers.

It’s helping. There is no dismissing the stress of what is happening to our planet and our lives; I have to remind myself we have reached the point where civil discourse is a zero sum game: I can only win if you lose. This winner-take-all cesspool is destroying everything I was raised to believe is the best of ourselves. If you fill in random letters on my crossword puzzle, I will not just have to berate you, I will have to burn down your house.

I wrecked my back more than a year ago. I’d repeatedly been unable to get it back to strength, until I took up crosswords.

Yep. Pulling myself off the internet made me realize what many medical practitioners have been coming to understand: we’re imbibing the bitter at such a steady rate, we are poisoning ourselves. Yelling into a vacuum was costing me my physical health as well as my mental wellbeing.

There was something to be said for processing news once or twice a day, to listening to or reading accurate reporting, and measured opinion.

Now, it’s like a daily stampede where someone has repeatedly spooked the horses and I cuddle over, protecting my head, trying not to get trampled. From that position, every moment feels terrifying and loud as well as like the last.

I sometimes wonder how we’ll eventually view this world we’ve created and embraced, this cacophony of hatred and meanness, of self-interest and stupidity, or if we’ll even have the chance. I look at those leading the scourge, and wonder if these counterfeit kings and queens will one day look back, like that other famous imposter Macbeth, and similarly realize, “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”