War All The Time
When did your bubble burst?
My first year of college was in 2001, the specter of the DotCom bubble bursting hovering. I was in a class called Modern Middle Eastern Studies my first semester. Originally journalism was my career path, a call that was disconnected when the harsh realities of writing news in the modern era came into focus. I wanted to be a history major with a minor in journalism, because nothing helps you understand current events better than those that preceded them.
Who knew when I signed up for that class, it would be so timely? Early in my collegiate career we experienced a world shattering event that we still haven’t recovered from. It was, at that time, the biggest event in my life. In the way that Gen Z/Zoomers will have their identity defined by Covid-19, our world view was shattered by a foreign attack on US soil. The end of the Millennial age of innocence and the start of the fruitless, endless war on terror.
Global events seem ancient in youth, when the time that separates you from them is longer than your lifespan, it is hard to reconcile events from the 70s as anything more than a relic. I remember the Challenger Explosion more from the spectacle. The Wall coming down, the end of the Cold War, was a justification of American propaganda for a small child. I remember Rodney King’s declaration and the riots in the aftermath. Those didn’t resonate with a young me, sheltered from the realities of the world by privilege.
Our first foray into Iraq was unreal to a kid in suburban North Carolina, despite the real work atrocities our nation was inflicting on a bunch of innocent people trying to survive a world desperate to kill them. By the time I was in college, I was very worried I would be conscripted to kill people in another country that had never done anything to me. It became difficult to live in a bubble surrounded by sharp, pointy truths.
Bubbles are delicate things, they require extra care to keep them intact. Once they pop, that’s it. They can split, sure, but if the one you’re in is gone, it’s never coming back. We had, culturally, a choice to make in September 22 years ago. Exhaust ourselves maintaining our bubble or let the truth flood in. That was a loud pop.
We’ve had them what feels like every year since. Smaller explosions, like Pat Tillman’s sacrifice. Bigger ones, like the housing market collapse from subprime loans. Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders’ rise, Colin Kaepernick, the wave of coverage of state sanctioned murder of innocent black lives and the rise of Black Lives Matter. All of these were assailants on the privileged world view of white America.
The 2016 presidential election felt like the culmination of the worst parts of our adult lives. I remember feeling so defeated when Trump was elected, in a way no other election had ever impacted me before. This was the validation of all the bad truths of our world coming into focus in a way so many people could no longer ignore. You’ll find for a lot of people, that was the popping point. Denying the truth no longer felt possible, because something so abhorrently bad had happened.
In a lot of ways, Trump being president made the actual biggest global event in our lifetime feel a lot worse. No one could have known that Covid would strike in the middle of his presidency, but his reaction killed a lot of Americans. The hardest part of having your bubble burst is the overwhelming flood of truth that comes in when that thin shimmer that distorted the real world is gone. It’s exhausting. You constantly feel like you’re drowning.
The people who have survived the flood seem like they are taunting you, because they make every atrocity seem so normal. Because they are so normal when you know to look for them. All the lies feel like fatal gut punches when you have never been hit before. Watching your world view go from a feeling of superiority over using the right version of their to people you thought you knew dehumanizing victims of state violence breaks your brain in a way it’s hard to comprehend.
Bursting My Bubble
History is an interesting hobby. Some people go into it for the truth, some people go into it to control the truth. I learned a lot in college about Al-Qaeda, who we had talked about before the attack, but I also learned about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. About people living on a parking lot with no access to clean water. And I learned about the US military support of Israel that allowed them to subjugate people just trying to survive.
A lot of adages about American politics are bad faith propaganda. The idea that college makes people liberal. The idea that people get more conservative as they get older. That police are just a few bad apples. That both sides of the political aisle are the same. That there is a major leftist political party in the United States is another political lie that is sold by both sides, ironically.
College exposed me to a lot of truths. About the world, about myself, about my worldview. I am sure I’ve hinted at it here before, but I certainly had more in common with incels than feminists in college and even after. When you know the world isn’t right, but you don’t know why it creates a deep sense of disaffection that is easily manipulated by bad actors. And when you can’t tell the good from the bad, because your brain is still developing and you’re learning how to discern information, you’re susceptible. You’re protected from the truth by a bubble, but lies that match your distorted view reinforce things you don’t want to address in your life. In yourself.
September 11th was a moment I couldn’t turn away from. I couldn’t rationalize away. I couldn’t deny the truth of anymore. I didn’t understand it at the time, of course. It took years and education, but what made me progressive was nothing more than the truth. I met people from the middle east in college. Had openly gay friends. I had people from oppressed groups challenge my severely misguided viewpoints. I had to grapple with misogyny, homophobia, objectification of women and white exceptionalism in a way that was never challenged before.
How easy it is to look at all the bubble bursting truths that exist and bemoan our fate. Why do we live in such dark times? Why are we being forced to reconcile atrocities we had no hand in? Why does this always happen to me?! To me, though, I’ve come to see these incidents in a different way. Galvanizing. Motivating. Every time I hear another bubble bursting, I thrust my hand into the water with a rope tied firmly around my waist. Pulling someone onto the shore means they get to fight for a better world too.
The Koch brothers, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks of the world want you focused on the bubble. Or they want you to drown. They don’t want you to survive. They don’t want you to organize and communicate. Some events are so big they open your eyes to a world you never would have seen before. Our generation has the proverbial thousand cuts but still goes on.
Swimming to Shore
2024 is ramping up to be another dangerous year in an era of dangerous living. The political landscape of America is a minefield. Bad faith actors have found ways to alter history in real time, the internet is littered with misinformation. Fascists have armed and are threatening anyone who stands in their way. The figurehead of the movement is a disgraced ex-president on trial for treason and also running for re-election. It sounds like a bad plot of a dystopian novel. A story we told to ridicule lesser nations in a way to propel American Exceptionalism.
Some of the Proud Boys are having their bubbles burst right now, but for a lot of them this is just further proof that they are right. It is no coincidence that religion is rife with bad actors. Religion is a place people go to make sense of the atrocities of the world, it makes sense that the people who inflict atrocities would want to control the story. Belief is a powerful tool. Think how adamantly people will argue for what they believe in.
It’s going to feel easy to let yourself get swept under or to find a new bubble to protect you from the world. I certainly have things that insulate me from the world still today:
9/11 taught me something else too. That I have an obligation to pay forward all the people who saved me. Who saved my soul. As a straight white male, I was a tool for oppression. I still am. As the American as Apple Pie discourse on guns has taught us, tools can build or break. I don’t presume to be an expert or authority, nor do I get it right every time. I just know that I was used to hurt a lot of people and I can use that same power to stand against it now.
There’s going to be a lot of cynicism over the next year and a half. A lot of bad faith propaganda. One of the current tactics is overwhelming people with the bad so that people cling to any good. Also, making non-issues major issues to overwhelm. This isn’t a new approach, it was very common post Great Depression:
Hopefully, we see the same organization and solidarity that rose in response to life at the turn of the last century, but maybe this time without the bubble.
Here’s an hour or so of music, a lot of it is stuff that Adrianne brought to the table! There’s also a close out of bands I’m getting ready to see live - Rozwell Kid, Austin Lucas and Thursday with Koyo.