How Did We Get Here?
Ignorance can be cured. Stupid can't.
I don’t have an easy answer for this
Dear Reader, this first is a true story with one name changed. I share it because I too am gobsmacked about how we got here. The rest is just, well, research. I’m taking a brief respite from my primary lane to rant a bit here. Bear with me. I’ll return to my regularly-scheduled programming after this sidebar.
My buddy Melissa and her friend Laura share an acquaintance with a woman named Eleanor. Eleanor is a Trump supporter; the other two are blue voters.
Laura took Eleanor to a Holocaust museum in Denver, where all these people live. Perhaps it was in hopes she might see some of the striking and terrifying parallels to some of what we’re seeing today all over the world.
As they walked past the photos of starved Holocaust survivors and read the descriptions of the deaths of six million Jews, Eleanor was visibly moved.
Progress, thought Laura. There’s hope.
Laura watched Eleanor’s reaction carefully. So she decided to test the waters as they were driving away.
What did you think?
It’s awful, said Eleanor.
What did it make you think about?
Oh my yes, said Eleanor. Our governor (Jared Polis, who is gay) is going to make us use PRONOUNS.
Pronouns.
That’s all Eleanor got out of a museum documenting the obliteration of six million humans beings.
That’s all she could fathom. She conflates pronouns with genocide.
Not only that, Polis isn’t going to make everyone use pronouns.
That community makes up 0.05% of adults and some 1.4% of young people.
They’re an easy target because they can’t fight back. The Colorado law is an attempt to protect their right to be referred to by the gender which feels true to them.
Just to be clear, the more controversial aspects of the law were removed after complaints and concerns were raised.
But this woman clings to her understanding as though it’s the end of her very existence, as though the use of pronouns for some people in certain circumstances were equivalent to her getting shoved into a gas chamber.
You may not agree with the Colorado law, which is your perfect right. The law was put in place to provide protections to transgender people in particular situations.
Propaganda works. Fear mongering and hate appeal to our base ignorance and they work.
Ignorance supports fascism, hate, and genocide, white supremacy, racism, all of it. It also results in community action which seriously harms the whole community.
The more ignorant we are, the fewer hard questions we ask. The more fearful we are, the more easily duped, manipulated, fooled.
How did we get here? Step by step. Inch by inch. Distraction by distraction.
With our permission, as we were so damned busy focusing on stuff that didn’t matter, the things that mattered most have been slowly but surely eroding: Education. Critical thinking. Knowledge of civics. History. Broader perspective. A bullshit meter born of careful thought. How to research. How to tolerate conflicting ideas and explore discomfort. Learning to work with and trust each other even if we disagree because of the greater good.
I’ve been to 47 countries. It’s been my long and often embarrassing experience that people in other countries know more about American history, government, civil rights and the like than we do, we who live here. They understand our Constitution, they revere what we stand for.
Stood for.
Without the basics, and millions of us are without the basics, we can’t have the most basic of conversations, conversations that potentially impact millions if not billions of people.
Smart isn’t very smart
But if you ask about television shows and influencers (who largely know nothing, thank you), they would probably get an A+, for stupid shit that has nothing at all to do with anything that genuinely matters: their country, the law, their rights (what’s left of them), the way their government works.
It’s how we lost body agency for women, for one example.
When parents can now attack what’s on the curriculum, and the parents aren’t that smart either, well. We’re in a fine pickle.
Look. You and I might disagree on policies.
We might disagree strongly on a lot of things. If we are to survive as a nation, and I am no longer convinced we will, we still need to be able to agree on some basics.
If a good portion of us have this level of understanding of one of the greatest evils of all humanity, and equates it with the idea of pronouns, we are lost. We can’t even create common ground on what constitutes genocide.
When we have a portion of the public convinced that the Earth is flat, that the moon mission was a hoax, to say nothing of the Looney Toons conspiracy theories that abound, we are up the creek.
How did we get here? Step by step.
There are no easy answers, but one of them is, above all, to stop allowing yourself to be distracted by shiny objects while an entire country is being pick-pocketed under our noses.
Stop leaning into fear, fear-mongering and conspiracy theories, assuming that people are out to get you when the only thing out to get you is your own ignorance. Kindly, that applies to all of us, not one party or group, this writer included.
This article from The New Federalist addresses the question of how we got here.
Here’s a quote that caught my eye:
Many people do not necessarily want their representatives or leaders to be competent or good, they would like their leaders to resemble them in their ignorance. One would be frustrated when having to hear a leader speak gracefully and eloquently with proper mannerisms because that’s not how he looks or sounds like on a daily basis. I would fall short from calling this “envy.” He does however see an “us’ and a”them“, if he is unable to understand the issue being presented by the current leader at hand, he resorts to mockery and disdain. He would want someone ignorant to lead the country. Someone ignorant just as he is. (author bolded)
Here’s what that looks like in practice, in real time, with real human consequences.
Disinformation and fearmongering result in the kind of mindless idiocy that hurts everyone. In my home state of Oregon, communities decided they were smarter than the firemen and scientists who really did understand the increasing wildfire threat to their homes.
The year I moved to Eugene, we had the worst fires in our history. Our air quality was the worst in the world as people, homes, animals and livestock were wiped out wholesale. The state government wanted badly to do what it could to prevent that from happening again.
Here is the map of the actual fires that season:
And here is the map of high risk areas that the Oregon government produced that pissed off the locals so badly:
A lot of care and work went into this map. To my eye the hazard map reflects where folks and forests are most at risk.
The local communities decided that it was a government plot to increase their insurance costs. Disinformation spread faster than the wildfires themselves. Rather than choose to understand the science, talk to experts and get a broader picture of what was really going on, people assumed the worst.
Having lived in Colorado with a firefighter roommate who hardened our house against wildfires, I care about what the experts say. But the locals got their way, and likely most of them won’t bother to do the hardening.
Anyone around here who lived through the Labor Day fires of 2020 might look at that attitude with a certain justifiable anger. More concerned about a government conspiracy than guidance on how to save your house, those communities may well lose everything the next time.
There will be a next time. There’s a next time every fire season, and fire seasons in some areas are now nearly all year-round.
Happening right now all over the West, as it does every single year, whether or not people want to believe in climate change. Destroying the NASA climate satellites doesn’t change the science, it just adds to our overall ignorance of what’s happening to the entire world.
The more you and I dim the light of education, curiosity and exploration, the more likely our ignorance will hurt us and those we love. Oregon’s experience here is a perfect example.
From the Propublica article:
During the June vote in the Oregon House, the lone person who voted to preserve Oregon’s wildfire map and its associated mandates was Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from the Portland area who’s a longtime firefighter and worked a brush rig during the 2020 wildfires.
She told ProPublica that by training, the first things she looks for while defending homes in wildland fires are the types of hazards the state intended to target: firewood under the deck, cedar shake siding, flammable juniper bushes growing close to homes. (author bolded)
Oh, and by the way, the “fake” climate change news, which includes the dangers about wild fires? Especially how such fires affect the air we breathe, no matter where we live?
Air pollution, which American politicians wrote Canada complaining about (no really, please see this) is deadly.
It isn’t just that fire can wipe you out, wipe out wildlife, millions of acres of air-cleaning green trees, but the resulting smoke can and does kill. This article from New Republic delves into that.
From that article:
The lethality of bad air is partly due to the range of illnesses associated with it. Bad air increases our risks of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, breast cancer, lymphoma, lung cancer, and heart attack. There is also significant evidence that air pollution takes a toll on mental health. Not only is it obviously depressing to be subjected to it, but the particulate appears to harm our brains in ways that impair our everyday functioning.
For weeks in 2020 as the Labor Day fires raged, the air quality outside was unbelievable. The air was nearly black. Imagine that junk going inside your lungs, damaging your body, your brain.
You can say that this is all fake news. You can claim that it’s all just a government plot to impinge on our freedoms. You can argue that it’s just a bunch of overly-educated pointy-heads who want to trample on your rights.
Overly-educated pointy heads are the reason we happen to enjoy the comforts and medical advances we currently enjoy. Just saying.
The coming air quality disaster from a wholesale return to oil and coal and other fossil fuels will fuel that lethality as well. The LA fires resulted in about 400 additional deaths from the deadly smoke full of toxic particulates.
But hey, don’t believe me. I believe the experts. The lizard-headed, flat-Earther baby-eating experts.
Call me crazy.
Be my guest.
But I believe the experts, because they did the work to become experts.
Mind who you follow, lest you end up going over a cliff with the rest of the uneducated.
The loudest folks are all too often the least-informed.
Let’s be well-informed. Let’s not be stupid.
PS: It occurred to me after publishing this that there is of course a proviso. Question, always question, and that includes said pointy-heads. But be educated enough to ask good questions and be able to determine an intelligent answer- including if it doesn’t happen to validate your opinion. This is how we grow.
I worked for the American Lung Association for six years -- don't even get me started on wildfire smoke. And I hear you SO loud and clear: as much as I intend goodwill toward my fellow human beans, it's really really hard to forgive willful ignorance. I don't know what can be done about people like your companion who came away from the Holocaust exhibit concerned about pronouns — at such moments I am happy to think back to April when I attended the Bernie Sanders & AOC "Fighting Oligarchy Tour" event in, of all places, Nampa, Idaho (doesn't get much redder than that) along with a FULL house in the biggest indoor venue in the state, all cheering their lungs out.
Shallow brooks are noisy...same idea, sort of.
Yes, I can concur w/ignorance of some citizens here. I was a volunteer Before the EA Poe Historic Site closed for a capital project last summer (still closed btw), here in Philly; now I volunteer at the Independence Visitor Center (IVC) and hear first hand from the NPS Rangers and Guides of the ignorance of our citizens. Sometimes ppl walk out of the tours of Independence Hall because they disagree with what is being explained about our nation's history. SAD,so very sad.