Welcome Brad Willis to WWdN! He’s sharing this special guest post with us while Wil Wheaton is at sea. Find more of his work at BradWillis.net and Rapid Eye Reality. He’s the genuine (guy-you-probably-haven’t-heard-of) best.
Along the path I walk my dogs, there is a place in the sidewalk where someone once saw an opportunity. On that day so many years ago, a contractor poured the wet concrete into its frame, took care to smooth it and make it level, and departed with hope the work would be left undisturbed.
On that same day, someone else crept up. That person knelt at the curb and, with no apparent concern for straight lines, scrawled a message for future walkers. It was a snapshot–a hot take, if you will–of whatever was happening in that vandal’s mind, a one-word ode to future generations of wide-eyed children and world-weary dog walkers:
BITCH
I see it every time I walk by, and I wonder just what was happening that day. I picture some kid with a stick in his hand. I see him looking over his shoulder as he drags the stick through the gravel and cement. I imagine him impressed with his ability to forever make his mark. That kid could’ve written anything.
That kid wrote: BITCH.
You can get a good measure of a man by putting him in reaching distance of some wet concrete.
Today, we all have a stick. We call it Twitter, Facebook, or whatever new thing gets angel-funded tomorrow. Every new day gives us a fresh square of wet concrete. Someone kills a police officer? Get out the stick. A police officer kills an unarmed person? Get out the stick. Politician says something terrible? Stick.
Though I was an early adopter in world of social media, it wasn’t until late 2012 that it started to give me pause. On the day Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six members of the Sandy Hook Elementary staff, my immediate gut reaction was impossible sadness and confusion. Within hours, I saw this post from a guy with whom I went to high school.
I screen-capped it and put it in a folder on my desktop to remind me of the first time I thought, “This is what we’ve become. We don’t go back from this.”
It’s since been said a hundred times over: if the murder of 20 children doesn’t bring America together in change, nothing will.
“Get off your heals (sic),” that guy wrote on the day of the Sandy Hook massacre. What should’ve been a cringe-worthy and laughable misspelling looked more like prophecy to me.
No matter what happened—maybe ever again—the time for healing was done.
It was apparently time to fight.
We all like to imagine we are capable of empathy. If there is any emotion that confirms us as human, it is our ability to viscerally feel another’s person’s pain. There are those among us who take pride in their empathy but who haven’t admitted they’ve developed a whole new sense of it. They are people who are only able to feel the pain of people like themselves. If it happens to someone else, if it happens to people of a different class, color, or creed, the empathy turns into something else.
When the tornado drops on Oklahoma, they think, “That’s what rednecks get for living in Tornado Alley.” When the fires jump from one mountain to another and burn $5-million homes, they say, “That’s what big money will buy the rich folks in California.” When the hurricane destroys historic New Orleans and crime starts to run over the Ninth Ward, they mutter, “What do you expect? It’s a sinful city full of poor people.”
It’s striking what the half-life of compassion has become. When we’re staring at tragedy in real time, we can find a way to relate to the parents of the dead children, the newly homeless, and the people who have nothing left but the memory of a place that simply isn’t anymore. But when the night passes and the tragedy is reduced to replayed tape, many of us fall back on some sort of innate selfishness that only allows our empathy to extend so far.
If that were as bad as it ever got, it might not be so terrifying to live in 2016. Instead, with each new patch of wet concrete, we see a more pronounced sort of faux-empathy. It’s the polarized kind that, in the face of a massacre, makes people ask first about the race and religion of the killers and their victims. It makes people ask if the unarmed victim of a police shooting had a criminal record. It makes people ask a rape victim if she’d had anything to drink. It makes people see a drowned child and insist refugees be quizzed on their understanding of Christianity before being given safe haven.
Polarized empathy isn’t empathy at all. It’s apathy of the worst and most destructive kind. It is, in fact, apathy that allows people to disguise rank hate as righteousness.
Situated along another sort of trail in the BITCH sidewalk’s home state, there was a man who wanted to be the leader of his country. Behind in the polls and in danger of tarnishing his family’s already-dubious political legacy, that man took an opportunity to send his own one-word message, one he hoped would endear him to the people and cement his reputation for future generations. That man wrote “America.”
This was the same state where ten months earlier a police officer was charged with murder for shooting an unarmed black man. It was the same state where nine people were shot to death in a church. It was the same state where Jeb Bush hoped to win the hearts and minds of South Carolina voters.
It maybe spoke less about Bush than it did the Presidential race as a whole. The level of discourse had devolved so much that the flailing member of the Bush dynasty went straight to the heart of the matter. Moreover, it probably spoke less about the Presidential race than it did the whole country. In a nation so polarized by its own manufactured empathy and righteousness, perhaps it seemed a pandering one-word clarion call was Bush’s last best chance.
Jeb (or, in fairness, perhaps a member of his campaign staff) wrote “America.”
I stared at that one-word caption to the photo for a long time, and it made me think, in spite of everything else I wanted to believe, “You know what? He may just be right.”
I’m 42 years old, and I have two young boys. They are confounding little creatures I treasure like nothing else I’ve ever known. Without them, I’d have trouble finding a reason to get out of bed on most days. In a way, that terrifies me, because I sometimes wonder if I might have made some different decisions if I’d been able to look a decade ahead and see what our society would become. I wonder if it was cruel of me to introduce innocent children into a world that would eventually become so violently and vituperatively polarized in every meaningful way. I am ashamed to say that there are nights I stare at my dark ceiling and wonder if my boys would’ve been better off not being born.
There is only one thing that keeps me from completely losing it.
Believe it or not, that sidewalk with the word BITCH written on it actually leads to hope.
It’s exactly a block and a half from that vandalized square of sidewalk to my sons’ elementary school. It takes just a couple of minutes to close the distance between the two, and when I do, I see children of every color and creed. They know about American politics. They know about Sandy Hook. They know some of their dads have guns and some of their dads do not. They know what it means to be a Christian, a Muslim, or from a house that doesn’t practice any religion at all.
A few months ago, I went to my younger son’s classroom for a career day presentation. Against one wall my son stood with two other students, and they gave me a brief presentation on what it means to be a police officer.
“They protect people. They keep us safe. The help lost kids find their way home.”
I stood there listening and thinking about the past two years of news. I thought about the American racial divide. I thought about the politics of policing. I thought of the police who died in the line of duty and the unarmed victims of police shootings. I thought about Americans’ polarized empathy and the screeching sound of all of us carving our American graffiti into already solid concrete.
I thought about all of that as I watched these three kids laugh and giggle. For that moment I forgot all about every hateful, spiteful, prejudiced, xenophobic, bigoted, and apathetic thing I’d read over the past decade, and I had hope that maybe these kids could write something different.
Hey, just wanted to let you all know that your guest blogger introductions are causing some consternation when these articles are cross-posted to various social media platforms. SPECIFICALLY, ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE GENERALLY REGARDED AS YELLING ON THE INTERNETS, AND ALL THESE POSTS ARE SHOWING UP THAT WAY.
A much better typographic style for these introductions is italics, as in this 2014 WWdN guest post (also written by Brad Willis):
http://wilwheaton.net/2014/02/a-guest-post-from-brad-willis-wheatons-law-revisited/
When you introduce a guest post with italics, IT DOESN’T BECOMING YELLING ON THE SOCIAL MEDIAS. (For extra internet points, please update/correct existing posts by removing the all caps.)
Hi! I’m aware of all-caps customs and interpretations. In years past, the italics introductions too-often went unread — as well as the bylines — so people mistook guest posts as posts by Wil Wheaton. Choosing between two frustrating scenarios, yelling or misattribution, I chose the one in which we yell at the beginning of each post to ensure those intros are seen. It’s blatant and heavy-handed, I know. (I called these “crassly all-caps intros” in a private message earlier.) If I could, I’d have the social-media cross-postings get their own intros, but that’s out of my control here.
I apologize for the yelling and appreciate you wanting to help out, though!
For what it’s worth, town criers also yelled. I see this as somewhat analogous to that.
Thanks for bearing with us.
Maybe I’m over-thinking this, but have you tried Small Caps?
Posting in all-caps is the internet’s version of “being a dick”. For the love of god, don’t be a dick.
Note that people generally don’t listen when they’re being yelled at, so it may not be working in the way you expect, at least in terms of the cross-posting where only the app caps ‘yelling’ part is shown.
Let me caveat that, while I don’t find it an effective treatment on the page here itself, it’s also not as glaringly loud here as it is on the cross-postings. It may be coming off as less “town crier” (who yelled simply to be heard at a distance) and more drunk uncle at Thanksgiving yelling directly in people’s faces. I have learned to ignore a number of things on the Internet: things shaped like banner ads are one, and all caps text is another because, the vast majority of the time, there’s simply nothing worth reading in either of those presentations. (TL;DR could also stand for “Too loud; didn’t read”) If anything, I will ignore all caps far more quickly than italics. It was only after multiple posts and irritated comments that I decided to come investigate and discovered they were guest intros.
So, in the category of, “please stop yelling at me” here are two thoughts 🙂
Have you considered another approach, like a mugshot to the upper left of the post? This is a very common styling that many people have come to expect and understand across different contexts and services. If the text starts with someone else’s avatar, I know it’s a guest. This may take some work on the backend, so not a very quick solution, but something to think about longer term.
Also, how about writing the intro in mixed case and use a CSS rule (“text-transform: uppercase”) to emphasize it/convert to uppercase? This should be minimal effort, the cross poster will pick up the mixed case, as it does not interpret CSS rules, and the uppercase will still be on the page itself. This is a simple matter of adding a CSS rule for guest intros with the advantage that it can be tweaked in A/B testing style until you find something that works excellently. As I pointed out above, many users have trained themselves to ignore all caps, so exploring some styling would likely result in a better, more nuanced approach long term.
I won’t belabor the point any more than this, just would like to see something a little less bark, more wag. It’s not so bad in context on the page itself, but it is coming off fairly poorly in the cross-postings which are in their entirety, all caps.
Thank you so much for writing & sharing here. I’ve often felt my overly empathetic nature is a burden, as it feels like something I can’t turn off. Like a raw nerve. Too ‘sensitive’ by many estimations. But you know, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Great piece, well done.
Excellent, well written and expresses exactly how I feel.
😀
Thank you for this. You have said so well what I haven’t even wanted to articulate. And I’m aware that I have more compassion for your point of view, because it is so similar to mine, and I am your age and also have 2 young sons.
Brad, well written!
The written word has never come easy to me. I was held back for remedial English classes in school, did an extra year of college prep schooling, and love it when I can afford an editor to help me overcome my pronounced dyslexia. Now I struggle to decide if I should brave writing this without more time, effort, and an editor – or spend days making a blog post with my editor friends. For I know too well how many can dismiss it over a miss placed phrase or misspelled word, ‘If he were not so lazy and careless he would not make such stupid mistakes and is clearly not worth reading because of his failings!’ – words I have herd many times and that still echo in my ears. Yet the power of you piece compels me to strike while my thoughts are fresh.
Your piece is so true and it deeply resonates.
First and most important, as a parent who lost his two daughters and wife to a truck driver asleep at the wheel, hold your boys close you never know when it may be your last.
Second the thoughts of caps vs italics at the top has far more depth to me than my first reaction of it as trivializing the post. It is a sign of the times you fear and embrace. As analytics, social pontification, and patches of wet concrete drive our ideas fewer can hear through the din without YELLING. Yet where does it drive our ideas? Analytics tells us it is what people will open, what they care to hear. Is this just a veil hiding the face of “every hateful, spiteful, prejudiced, xenophobic, bigoted, and apathetic thing I’d read over the past decade”? Analytics tells us who we were, where we came from, and how we learnt to be from our history. What is the secret to write, do, be what compels us all to look a new and reinvent ourselves? To learn the religion we hate. To give up the religion that dispels our fears and brings us hope. (Is there a more true faith than to trust it will be ok while giving up something known and deeply trusted?) To see and feel the needs of those who have hurt us deeply; like that truck driver who just needed to dive a few more hours and make a few more dollars to care for his loved ones.
We need to take hope and comfort from the assurance that much of the YELLING is just a veil over extremist, bigoted, xenophobic, hateful faces fearing the loss of the comfort and security that these simple beliefs arrogantly handed out and cannot deliver. The veil will fall.
Readers, I have replaced the introductions across this week’s guest posts thus far and shall effect the same change on future posts. Above all, I hope this will encourage further discussion and commentary on the substance of the posts themselves instead of distracting from them with my foolishness.
Thanks for bearing with us. I hope you continue to enjoy this week’s guests!
You’re doing a great job, Will. I’m sorry some folks find it necessary to be so pedantic and COMPLETELY miss the point of the content (amusingly for this post). You and the guests are all doing great, keep up the thoughtful work 🙂
It is ironic that the issue with the caps has caused people to almost instantly split up into factions and attack each other (not as much here as in the comment sections where this is cross-posted), thus giving a live demonstration of the article itself.
“It was apparently time to fight.”
Polarized empathy? Try these on (looking at both sides now):
“Wil Wheaton, I’m going to unfollow you until the all caps posts stop.”
“Wow, there are some f**king crybabies on today, aren’t there?”
“Will Wheaton, I believe you should replace whoever it is that you have writing your posts nowadays.”
“Fake internet rules people think are faux pas”
“God damn Wil, what’s with all the shouting?”
“Why is everyone butthurt about the caps? Is it that important?”
Really? All this for something that could have been, “Hey, did you notice this thing may not be great? Oh, I see, yeah I’ll fix that.”
We don’t discuss, we don’t debate, we don’t talk. Everything has to be a war. Pitchforks and torches all around…
I pondered this morning whether I should post at all. It was getting to the point that the vast majority of social media comments were about the caps, and not the content of the articles being posted. So, I wondered… was it possible to simply address this politely, to note that there may be something amiss and simply have it resolved? Was it possible for this whole thing to be resolved without two sides polarizing and attacking each other? Your response was great, really. Unexpected and great. You read to what I had to say, you gave me more information about your approach and why you did it that way. I responded in kind with suggestions on how multiple goals might be achieved after understanding your points. Just imagine if we could have that kind of exchange about something that mattered, like the economy, healthcare, violence… So thanks for that, Will. Seeing children doesn’t give me hope like it does for Brad because they just haven’t been corrupted by hate yet. They almost all turn, eventually. Seeing an adult chose a better path despite the opportunity to do otherwise, that gives me hope.
You’re doing a fantastic job, Will. Thanks!
This is one of the best blog posts I’ve read in years.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
In fact, this surpasses the (formerly) best description of SOCIALMEDIA(tm) that my wife came up with several years ago. She said, and I’m paraphrasing: “You know, 20 years ago, these people used to sit on stools in depressing little cinderblock bars and rant at under-tipped bartenders. Now everyone has to listen to them.”
But “stick in wet cement” somehow captures it better, because it alludes to the “media vandalism” inherent in the act.
It is worth noting the Sandy Hook massacre was used to attack Constitutional rights, as predicted. Speaking out for your rights is not unacceptable. It does not show a lack of empathy. What is empathetic about losing your rights? The post pointed out a truth. There are grief mongers that leap on tragic events for political gain. As predicted, it happened over Sandy Hook which unleashed a barrage of unconstitutional bills. Whether you are for or against gun control, trying to capitalize on a tragic event like Sandy Hook is uncalled for.
It’s also worth noting that the human race has never been particularity empathetic. Attending public hangings was a popular form of entertainment around 1900. Families would pack a picnic lunch. The sports most popular like football, soccer, boxing, hockey, and even basketball are filled with brutality and violence. Our lack of empathy extends back to ancient Rome and beyond. One look at the Roman Colosseum proves the point.
The internet shoves our lack of empathy in our faces. It’s plastered on social media. We have it hammered home on blog posts. We see the vultures turn times of mourning into coldly calculated grasps for political gain. Where is the compassion? The sympathy? There isn’t much to be found. The internet doesn’t make us less empathetic. It merely gives us a platform to broadcast our cold hearts.
Our hope lies with the young. If we give them a true sense of empathy the internet might look a lot different in 20 years.
Wow. Your post crystallizes the the general “feel” of our time. Where do we go from here?
You know what I thought when I first heard about Sandy Hook? I thought, “Oh god, please don’t let the shooter be Autistic..please please PLEASE don’t let him be on the spectrum.”
Because my kid is on the spectrum and I feel that every time there is a mass shooting of some sort, almost always it comes out that the shooter is on the autism spectrum. I feel that I almost don’t want to tell people my son is autistic (what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome but technically isn’t anymore) because I don’t want them to look at him and think “Gee..I hope he doesn’t snap and go buttnutz crazy.”
FIRST OF PLEASE UNDERSTAND I CAN NOT SEE AND NEED CAPS AND I AM NOT NOT YELLING JUST TRYING TO SURVIVE IN THE WORLD OF EVERYBODY LOOKS AT CAPS LIKE YELLING SO ARE ALWAYS YELLING AT ME FOR USING CAPS. I LIKE WHAT YOU SAY IN THIS POST AND WHAT YOUR SCHOOL CHUM SAYS IN HIS. THESE ARE THE TIMES AND YOU HAVE MANAGED SAY IT VERY WELL.
I liked that. Thanks for sharing.
I think if BITCH had been scrawled into that wet cement in lowercase, the impact of what it meant and why it was written would be far, far less.
Peoples’ social graces have been handicapped by the internet, they don’t gloss over the faux pas to get to the real content. They are the entitled dog walkers, seeing the decades old graffiti, and only thinking, “How dare they ruin my day with their filth”
Beautiful commentary. Thank you.
Use all caps if you want to, you’re in charge of the blog!! Sometimes I need to be yelled at……so I pay attention. Great blogs this week by the way.
I feel like several issues these days come down to cases of “My opinion is the only one that’s right”, which generates a complete lack of discussion. We’ve all forgotten the lesson that we might not be completely right, or even right at all, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.
I could swear we learned compromise and sharing when we were in elementary school. I don’t know when that was lost, but I miss it.