National Post (National Edition)
Don't make Instagram all the rage
If you want to know how mad I am, you can check my Twitter feed. Or my Facebook page, if I could remember how it works. Or my columns. Anything but my Instagram feed. It's an oasis of calm.
I don't want to be accused of false advertising here. I'm not suggesting that I post a steady stream of such high-quality soothing or inspirational images that your mental balance will be improved or (cribbing from that brilliant laundry-strip ad) a baby turtle will go to college. On the contrary, it has at most the Zen calm of a lonely stretch of moor since I rarely post anything. And when I do it's something I cooked, or me swimming, and if those photos improve your life I wouldn't go admitting it.
Still, I am suggesting that with all the rage out there, I joined Instagram hoping it might be a refuge of sorts. And it should.
Not because I necessarily want to see all your cutesy pix either. A lot of stuff people post I don't know what they're trying to say or why.
OK, I exaggerate. I don't visit it often enough to see a lot of stuff. I dislike social media for many reasons I won't be posting on Instagram, from triviality to unwieldiness to obsessive time-wasting to the quest for offence including the omnipresent trolls with whom one can develop an unwholesome digital symbiosis.
Which might make you sneer since I'm a columnist who makes a living denouncing stuff. Including social media. And those ludicrous video game ads I won't stoop to describe in print. But for that contrast I make an apologia not an apology.
There is a lot wrong with the world and pretending it's not there makes it worse. As we need persons of fire because buildings ignite, and doctors because people get sick, we need polemicists because people do mean stupid stuff.
Especially when the Emperor has no clothes, and apparently no gym membership either, it needs to be proclaimed in suitably colourful language. And face it, if you're still reading this column, you're still reading this column, so you must think there's some purpose to this kind of stuff, if only that the idiocy of my views repulses you in the general direction of something more reasonable and dignified. But I digress.
The point is, I'm not embarrassed to spend my life exposing idiocy in public policy or culture, any more than I would be to spend it fixing broken machinery. Even if the latter required scrubbing my hands at the end of the day
before moving on to other things, while the former requires scrubbing my brain. But I do move on to other things. And I thought Instagram was meant to be a reflection of that impulse more broadly. Instead the increasing invasion of polemics seems to be a reflection of people being so angry, for reasons ranging from understandable to unbalanced, that wherever they go they bring a fight with them.
There's a well-travelled anecdote about a student asking the sensei why he preaches peace among people while teaching martial arts, and being told “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” And as Bertolt Brecht said, a jewel in his mental midden heap, if you do not go to war it will come to you. But I thought one social medium, at least, might be a place where online warriors garden.
Again, I am not inviting you to visit my figurative or literal garden and learn either horticulture or peace. It's all I can do to keep seedlings (or followers) from wilting just by talking to them. (I think my results with the vegetation might also be connected with believing every plant not currently flourishing must need watering, including cacti and herbs with root rot.) Still, if the jalapeno survives and fruits, I'll plant it on Instagram some day. If not, there's more where it came from. Also dead, regrettably.
Meanwhile what I am inviting people to do is periodically to put aside the consultants' cunning guide to being a more effective cutting-edge influencer, and the atavistic impulse to crush your enemies' tiny heads, and ask instead what you've achieved that might in some small way comfort or inspire a fellow being. Including possibly to think that if that clown can grow a cucamelon (again, a thing far from established at time of writing) or fry an egg, I can grow orchids and make shad roe casserole.
If so, share it on Instagram, along with the puppies, kayaks, macramé and, if nothing can deter you, your unbearably cute kid. Leave the war outside the garden. It will still be there when you emerge. I assure you.
BETTER TO BE A WARRIOR IN A GARDEN THAN A GARDENER IN A WAR.