An old friend, someone who sees things a little differently than I do, shared another Facebook user's post today:
I love this post for so many reasons.
This is a perfect post.
This is the most perfect perfection social media could hope to produce.
Across the nation there are protests. A number of the protests have included violence - sometimes protesters lashing out at police and businesses, sometimes police lashing out at protesters and the media.
The protests are a reaction to a number of high profile incidents of racial violence and a collective understanding that these incidents demonstrate the deep inequities woven into our nation's culture.
All of that is happening in the shadow of a pandemic that has killed over 100k Americans, halted the global economy, and left many without a job for months.
And this social media warrior took to the internet to tell their friends in no uncertain terms: That's all a distraction from a court ruling about emails from before 2016.
Without this post, I could never hope to better understand the problems we are having in our national discourse.
This person wants others to believe everything is a distraction from what happened in 2016 and the media is complicit in the creation of those distractions.
This is the voice of all the people who cannot see past their one pet interest. So for them, when people are paying attention to anything else, that serves as confirmation that the rest of the world has been duped. They are the only ones with sharp enough focus to see what's actually happening in this country.
And that is what's wrong with how we argue right now. Most everyone is looking at the world through the lens of their tiny little concern. How do these riots impact the Russia Investigation? How does Black Lives Matter affect the president's approval ratings? How does police brutality change the way I read Twitter?
These are the absurd questions people pose in our corrupted discourse.
I enjoyed reading that post today because it reminded me to ignore these questions because they are the distraction.
