On feeling a way through the day, one line at a time, when everything is hard and also on fire. Plus two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and Aracelis Girmay.
May 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022Liked by Kristin Lueke
"...we owe each other nothing and there are no consequences for cruelty."
We owe each other nothing. I just realized when I read this line -- that's the problem with social media, isn't it? We somehow feel permission to break the social contract. We are free to yell obsenities at people we'd normally smile and nod to in the grocery line. Then we put it out of our mind -- probabaly feel a little lighter for getting it off our chest -- and go about our day without any regard for how those words may have landed. And, as you point out, without consequences.
It's kind of like that experiment they did with the people asking another person questions and giving them an increasingly larger electric shock every time they give a wrong answer. Most people bail -- eventually. But that's only because they can hear the screams. And they don't bail as quickly as one would hope. Probably not as quickly as they would hope. I wonder what would happen if they couldn't hear the screams?
No consequences. No eye contact. What's "social" about that?
Great post. Hope you can find your way out of the Twitter forest.
♥️
"...we owe each other nothing and there are no consequences for cruelty."
We owe each other nothing. I just realized when I read this line -- that's the problem with social media, isn't it? We somehow feel permission to break the social contract. We are free to yell obsenities at people we'd normally smile and nod to in the grocery line. Then we put it out of our mind -- probabaly feel a little lighter for getting it off our chest -- and go about our day without any regard for how those words may have landed. And, as you point out, without consequences.
It's kind of like that experiment they did with the people asking another person questions and giving them an increasingly larger electric shock every time they give a wrong answer. Most people bail -- eventually. But that's only because they can hear the screams. And they don't bail as quickly as one would hope. Probably not as quickly as they would hope. I wonder what would happen if they couldn't hear the screams?
No consequences. No eye contact. What's "social" about that?
Great post. Hope you can find your way out of the Twitter forest.
~Graham