Hippies

I am going to make a sidelong diversion into politics for a hot minute, but I think this post applies to the mission of this project, because it is about being out in the world.

If the resistance to 47’s regime is social media based, it will not accomplish anything.

I have been reading a lot about the 60s. Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, others, and here’s one thing I picked up from all of this - the hippies were politically naive, given to believing in conspiracy theories and psychedelic fantasies, arbitrarily contrary, paranoid, and often teetering on the edge of a health crisis. In many ways, they were ill suited to be the public face of the protest movements they came to be associated with, and some of those movements felt so too. But, the thing was, the hippies were outside in the world for all to see and contend with. They were undeniably there.

For the past fifteen years or so, the left has been mainly an online thing, heavily invested in social media and social media justice. While there have been public protests, I went to many of them during the first term, most of those people that we refer to as the uninformed voters - also known as the people who swing elections - have associated progressive movements with online shaming, cancel culture, Orwellian social media struggle sessions in which we cut off the heads of those who would seem to be guilty of disagreeing by degrees with whatever orthodoxy was being handed down by undergrads, and then toss those heads into the bottomless blackhole of a never ending purity spiral. Everyone seemed to be laboring under the notion that we could shame our way to a more equitable world and we could do it all without ever leaving our couch. It would happen on Facebook and twitter and TikTok. We’d make such an online noise that the powers that be would cower and quake and make Al Franken resign!

And it seemed to work. Until, The Right discovered the glaring weakness in this plan - It only works on you if you care. And no one had to care. In the end, you can just walk away, block people, talk to someone else. And the more people who didn’t care, the weaker the social media justice movement got. When there were finally more people outside than in, there was nothing left of the left. This realization blew a great big hole right through the center of the online progressive world, which was dominant by this point. So when the tide swung, and those uninformed voters tuned in for the last week of the election as they always do, they saw a powerless, hollowed out coalition that was, frankly, no fun. In fact, it just felt treacherous. And that was the impression they’d had for a decade or more, anyway. But now there was this monster truck rally they could vote for instead. So they did. And then, all the gains started to slide. Trans people started being stripped of their rights, abortion was already gone, companies who were no longer afraid of online cancellation began ditching the DEI programs they had never been sincerely committed to in the first place, immigrants started having to live in fear. All because someone showed the assholes that you don’t have to fear an online mob anymore.

And what was worse, when what had been accomplished was tossed aside, that only revealed all the ways we have failed in the physical world. The ever increasing income gap, the housing crisis, our inability to do anything at all about kids being shot in school, the climate, our total paralysis when it came to building the things we had earmarked funds and passed bills to get constructed. It was like a stiff wind blowing away a heavy fog and revealing nothing but a desert.

This brings us back to the hippies. So what did these unwashed stoners who thought you could cure STDs with crystals have that the current left doesn’t? They were out on the street, they were in the parks, out in the cities, day or night, and yes, at protests and civic actions lending mass and numbers to the more earnest and studious organizers. But they were also doing concerts and theater events and taking drugs and generally, having a great time in full view of everyone who might have otherwise wanted to deny that culture and politics were going through a radical change.

I cannot stress this last part enough. The people in the current admin, they do not care about protests right now. Because, they are operating on the idea that all attention is good attention, or good for their goals, at least. If we are protesting them, or posting angry things about them, or making endless lists of every abuse and every way in which they twist the values this country is supposed to be built on, that is, by their current calculation, awesome. If we’re mad at them, they are happy, because it is about them, and them being the center of the action is all that matters. Now, certainly, anger and protest are reasonable, appropriate, and necessary, but it can’t be the only tool in the box. If it is one third of a movement that is also doing other things, fun things, creative things, public things, things that seem to have energy and momentum and seem like something to be part of in the real world, things that don’t even mention the other side, and something that people are welcome to be part of without having to be afraid of the other people they find there, then you are getting somewhere. And we better hurry, because The Right has a head start.

I have seen people post this twist on the old Gil Scott Heron poem - “The revolution will not be streaming.” It’s worse than that. The revolution already happened. It happened on the right. And people have been swept up in the excitement of it the way people always are by revolutions. But revolutions burn hot and fast and if they fail to deliver, people lose interest pretty quick and start looking for something else. If we don’t have something people want to be a part of, something fun and exciting, when they realize that these jackasses can’t solve all their problems like they said they could, then they will wander back to their private lives and try to ignore things as they break down. We will not get them just because we’re the only game left. We are a partisan country, but there is a third party and it’s called Netflix. No one is going to assume we have the answers just because the dicks in office prove they don’t. And when they reject us because we’re peddling the same old crap we’ve been putting out there since 2010, the only thing they will join us in is powerlessness.

If you are only online, you are not being seen by the people you need to join you, nor the people you need to fear you. You are just more noise in a system built of endless noise and it is a noise that the other side has already mastered, tamed, and gelded. You have to be a physical presence in the world where you can't be denied and the algorithm can't push you down the news feed, and you need friends out there with you. That is why the most lasting and powerful thing that has happened in the last ten years was the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests. But we can't wait around for the next terrible death and, now, they'll be ready for that anyway. It has to run both deeper and wider this time, or it will be as fleeting as Target's commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.