And it did saith unto me, "Go, and tweet no more"
The start of a new year seems a good time to let go of anger.
This is looking south up the Willamette River from the Sellwood Bridge in Southeast Portland. I saw this the other morning on my run and it stopped me in mid-shuffle. You think of winter as dreary and dark and then that low sun surprises you.
I had sort of a Burning Bush episode with a wet bumper sticker and I’ll get to that in a minute, but right now let’s just enjoy the scenery.
With the Sun, it’s all about the angle. Give the Earth about 180 more spins and the Sun will be up over us high, bright and warm again. It’s just the southern hemisphere’s turn for summer now.
Give the Sun its due, though. Even on these cold and raw days, low as it rides on the southern horizon, it can put on a show up here in the Pacific Northwest.
It’s a relatively ordinary star, our Sun. A dense, gigantic ball of glowing plasma that warms and lights the Earth from 93 million miles away, and has been doing so for more than 4 billion years. And has enough gravitational pull to keep us and all the other planets spinning in tow. NASA has a wonderful site about the Sun. It’s a Yellow Dwarf star, which if I’d known before, I’d forgotten.
This was sunrise just a week before the photo from the bridge. When you can step out on your porch and see something like that, it makes you feel better. Makes you feel like we’ll get through it, like we’ll shake off the poison.
The Sun did that again this morning. For a few minutes, precious time, it colored the entire eastern horizon in rose pink and orange. My goodness.
You can’t look upon such things without thinking about our existence, how we got here and what the hell, so to speak. I’m a lapsed altar boy, not religious, but damn.
Sometimes, too often, I drop into a deluded, self-inflicted anger that spills out and hurts those I love. The other day during a break in the morning rain I was walking the dogs along the Oaks Bottom bluff and waded deep into one of those episodes. I was hateful about myself for damage I’ve caused and for my failures, I realize now, but rather than face it, I turned it outwards. I cursed in my head about the bitter failings of others and how their insults, foreign and domestic, have assaulted me without reason for decades. Sometimes I wonder if other people see my lips moving as I rage back at my perceived attackers.
I stopped my ranting for a minute as the dogs paused to sniff the grass. I kind of laughed. “OK, God,” I said. “If you’re there, show me a sign or some goddamn thing.” And I kind of laughed again.
About 100 feet further along I came across a piece of paper at the base of a utility pole. It was a sodden sticker of some sort, about the size of an index card, the kind of bumper sticker or decal you see for sale on a rack at the convenience store counter.
I picked it up. There was some sort of design on it, and it said, “Settle the fuck down.”
Man. I acknowledge that as people like me age they are more likely to look for a Burning Bush moment. Some sign of something, like when God told Moses to go see the pharaoh and get his people out of Egypt.
The wet bumper sticker gave me what should be an easier task. It said, “Settle the fuck down.”
So I’m trying, again, to do that. One thing that will help is eliminating external candy trays of malice such as Twitter. I intend to unplug from it after I post this (including on Twitter, yes, sigh).
I hasten to acknowledge (great word, hasten) that no one will notice when I leave. More than 350 million people worldwide use Twitter. My 2,000-some “followers” are a spit in the Willamette compared to many other accounts. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to name just one celebrity, has 2.2 million followers.
If you’re on Twitter you know it got even more nasty when Tesla spaceman oligarch Elon Musk bought it. True, the posts and comments were often snarky and mean-spirited before, but now the dumbshits, racists, traitors, bots, fools, fascists, deranged conspiracy freaks, smug hypocrites and vile buffoons have been given free rein to…
See? Twitter is an Outrage Machine. It is a constant, incessant, lurid invitation to be outraged. Raise your hand if you hate X. Retweet if you want X arrested. Lock them up. Shut them down. It’s like the daily two minutes of hate from the novel “1984.” Jump on, call names, scream insults, then go back to your life, citizen.
I looked at the Twitter home page the other day and learned that POS (Piece of Shit) was “trending.” As in: (Fill in the name of a political figure you despise) is a POS. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, who thought it was funny to bus migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home on Christmas Eve, recently was a primary target of the POS hashtag.
Of course there are people on Twitter whose tweets are kind, funny, even-handed or insightful. They are badly outnumbered. Most people posting on Twitter are angry about something. Some are just plain rotten.
Here’s the tweet that broke the connection for me. It was from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz. You may know about him. If not, look him up. He’s from Florida (Of course! I cry, getting in one last slap), a magat trumpsucker (Take that! I add) with a hairstyle and facial expression stolen from Beavis of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” (Ha! Strike three!)
For background, right-wingers such as Gaetz ridicule anything they label as “Woke” and are particularly disdainful, still, of Covid-19 restrictions and requirements. It is one of their favorite things to spit at.
So here’s what our boy Matty tweeted on Dec. 20:
“In Florida, if you’re still wearing a mask, we just assume you’re hideous.”
“You EFFING POS!” my brain screamed as I began a response along the lines of, “Talk about hideous…”
This is a member of Congress acting like a seventh grader. His sniveling, insulting remark was intended to provoke a reaction. It tells you everything you need to know about Those People and their mindset and…
And. And. And.
But this time I didn’t respond, didn’t post a comment. He wouldn’t see it. He wouldn’t care what some wokey wimp out in Antifaville, Oregon, had to say. It wouldn’t make a difference. Any satisfaction I got would be short-lived. And plenty of other people, thousands, told him off in their comments.
But much more importantly, it’s best that I step around that kind of anger.
The wet bumper sticker, sodden and creased at the base of a utility pole, said settle the fuck down. Just like it was scripture.
I have walked along that very bluff in many moods & stages of weather. I have snapped photos of cityscapes, sunsets, sunrises & snow storms. I have been thankful, happy & extremely sad. Most people who are regulars along that little path have seen eagles & most call them majestic, but one morning a man coming along on an electric bike, shot the birds a bird & called them evil fuckers. By calling the lion of America's sky names he somehow imported his negativity into my otherwise tranquil moment of admiration. I began to doubt seeing such a massive creature of prey was a good thing. Twiiter has it's own hooked bill, & instead of soaring in flight, it soars in people heads offering little bully pulpits to retaliate on. It gives them massive wings to give flight to anything from ridiculousness to abomination. I cut my strings & flew when Elon Musk came swooping in to fix what was already too broken.
It is a struggle. This reacting out at what we see that we feel as hatred. It’s easy for me to beat myself up along with the perceived enemy. So ya. Clear the head. Stay off the bad news diet. I try.