It's always an option to just say nothing
It's always an option to just say nothing
A non-ironic post about why we should all post less. Or never. Never is good.
Every family has those little stories or phrases that family members repeat back to one another, and growing up, one such story from my family was that of the Skibbereen Eagle. The town of Skibbereen has a population of about 2,000 people, and it sits near the southern coast of Ireland in County Cork. The town’s only claim to fame comes from a (perhaps apocryphal) story that in 1898, the publisher of the local newspaper ran an editorial in which he criticized Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who at that time was waging an imperialist campaign to annex Manchuria, setting the stage for a major conflict with China. Why was the publisher of a village newspaper in Ireland seeking to condemn the actions of the Russian Czar, some 5,000 miles away on the far side of Asia? Who knows. It’s absurd to even think about. The paper had a circulation of .. I’m guessing 500? Tops? What would the Irish farmers and villagers of 1898 getting their weekly paper even care about Manchuria? In any event, the tag line from this op ed from more than 100 years ago was something my father would often repeat at odd moments — The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on the Czar of Russia.1
And that’s the line that keeps running through my head lately, given recent world events. Israelis and Palestinians are at war with one another, and well.. the Skibbereen Eagle is on it. The posting from friends and friends-of-friends and micro-blogs with a follower count that surely rivals that of small town Irish newspapers is non-stop.
I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that the conflict in Israel and Palestine is somehow irrelevant to everyone’s lives, or that no one should really care about what’s happening. What I’m saying instead is — why post about it? It's just always an option to not say the thing. To not post. And the older I get.. the more that's where I come down. Me and my little Instagram account of a few hundred followers.. I’m the Skibbereen Eagle. What could I possibly say that would further the conversation? I'm not so full of myself as to think it's incumbent on me to say something. I'm not a Thought Leader. I don’t have a weekly op ed column anywhere, such that it’s my job to muse and pontificate on events of the day. I’m just doing what everyone else is doing.. mindlessly scrolling through my phone in odd moments, reading things, reacting to things.. and otherwise just living a life of comfort that, yes, is thousands of miles away from the conflict and is not directly affected by any of it.
But then I click over to do said mindless scrolling and I’m suddenly inundated with opinions and moral outrage and posts from all sides. Which.. of course, it’s the internet, and I shouldn’t expect otherwise, I know. People have strong opinions, and I don’t want to say that they shouldn’t. This isn’t an “everyone should be more reasonable,” rant on my part. I think rigid, dogmatic centrism that insists “both sides have blood on their hands / the answer lies in the middle / why can’t we all get along?!” is naive and pointless and usually just pisses everyone off. It amounts to saying, “I think you all should calm down,” when the actual facts and history of the people involved show exactly why that’s impossible. These conflicts are so bitter and divisive precisely because whatever is in the “middle” either doesn’t really exist or isn’t an actual solution to the problem.
So what is it I’m even upset by, here? Israel-Palestine is an intractable, contentious issue of our day. People (myself included!) have thoughts about it, and they want to be heard. But.. I still have to ask.. how are you so sure about what you think that you feel motivated to post about it? You, sitting here, in the United States, comfortably staring at your phone in between bites of a Potbelly sandwich, or waiting on the train platform. How are you so certain that you are getting it right? That the anger and moral outrage you feel is the correct anger, uncomplicated and unimpeachable by anyone else’s lived experience? I confess, the sheer arrogance of posting about this particular topic really gets me. It’s the idea that .. well.. here are two groups of people who have been in near-constant conflict with each other for (depending on how you count) somewhere between 75 and 4,000 years. This conflict has led people to carry out abominable, unthinkable horrors for generations, and diplomats and statesmen from all corners of the globe have made it their life’s work to try and mediate it. But sure. You, with your phone and a TikTok reel that you saw once.. you know what’s up. You know what it’s like to live in this part of the world, and you’ve sized up the conflict just right using a meme for god’s sake. So go ahead and post.
Is it possible, if you stop to think about it for just a moment, that you, dear poster, are engaged in common, everyday knee-jerk tribalism? And even if you’re absolutely sure that’s not what you’re doing — how are you so sure? That’s where I always get hung up.
Because even though the attack on Israel by Hamas was horrific, and the plight of the Palestinian people is also horrific, and the thought of more innocent people dying in the days and months and years to come is all so, so horrific — I lack the ability to translate those facts into a single vision of moral clarity for myself. I can only say that human beings — all of us — are human. We are all deserving of human dignity because we are born and live lives full of joy and sorrow and achievements and failures. We are (self evidently) capable of unimaginable cruelty but also its opposite. And each one of 8 billion people on planet earth will at some point wake up and start the day and go about their lives, and looked at in this huge aggregate, we lose sight of each individual’s humanity but we are human, each of us, with inner lives and anxieties and self doubt and needs — and among those needs is security and safety and connection with other humans. That’s honestly where I stop. Beyond this simple notion, I start to lose confidence that I’m right about anything.
So yeah. The posting kinda gets to me.2 Because the conflict does weigh on my mind heavily, and I try to seek out writers who are saying thoughtful, important, and well-reasoned things about these events. I try to make sure I’m not simply reading things I agree with, and I take time to try to understand arguments that by instinct I might first want to brush aside.
But posting takes away from all of that. Because even though I might prefer to engage this topic through a series of well-developed arguments or deeply reported news stories, I’m instead confronted with some random “fact” or snark that was re-grammed from a PopCrave or NowThis post. Is the thing I just read even true? Or does it just feel true? Who’s to say. What am I to *do* with this new information I’ve been presented, if not just accept the tacit invitation to be jaded and angry in the precise way this particular post wants me to be?
And I mean.. the context of the post itself just further underscores the incoherence of it all. That incendiary, caustic IG story you just made about the horrors in Gaza is sandwiched in between … what? Your thirst trap from the gym that morning and a Spotify screen grab of some album you’re listening to in the afternoon? Again… what .. what’s the point? How am I to react? The lives of the actual people in Gaza are so, so removed from this ensconced, decadent, silly little experience you and I have in our daily lives here in the U.S. And these small, trivial little posts can only serve to cheapen our discourse. We deserve better. The people we’re writing about and thinking about deserve better.
So I confess, I’m weary of the posts and a little scared off by their moral fervor — like any vulnerable, weakly-held or conflicted opinion that anyone else might have has been crowded out of the discourse space. Maybe I feel silenced somewhat. Maybe I just feel like I arrived in a party where everyone is shouting and yelling, and I want everyone to like me (or at least think neutral thoughts about me) and so I just keep my mouth shut. I don't think that's what's actually going on .. but it's the effect of me not saying anything, right? I just say nothing. Sometimes I wish others said nothing, too.
Of course, I’m not advocating for just throwing up your hands and saying, “It’s Israel/Palestine — can’t solve it / what’s the point in discussing it” — because there’s lots of good reasons to discuss it. It should be discussed. Thoughtfully, and meaningfully, and preferably in person with people whose ideas you respect and who you want to engage with. But posting just isn’t that. It’s a quick hit; a reaction to a thing said in the middle of an argument that I didn’t know I was having with the person who just posted. It’s that old refrain about the worst aspects of the internet — just someone making up the idea of someone in their head and then being mad at what that imaginary person thinks. And for what? Just say nothing. It’s always an option to say nothing.
Even assuming the Czar was aware that the Skibbereen Eagle existed (which he surely was not).. what was the Czar to do with this information? How heavily would the moral judgment of the Skibbereen Eagle weigh on the Czar’s conscience? Unclear.
I admit maybe my views on this topic might come off as a little strong, even as I argue against expressing strong views on the merits through social media. In this way, I’m probably influenced more by my own upbringing than I am anything else. My dad (born in Ireland in 1931) had strong, largely uncomplicated views about the UK and about the conflict in Northern Ireland. He knew what he thought because he had lived through it. He had family members who died because of it, and family members who took part in it. But there was absolutely no way you were ever going to get him to talk about it. His views weren’t a secret or anything, but he wasn’t going to engage the discussion. What was there to say? Senseless, horrific violence had resulted in indiscriminate death and loss for decades. Communities and families lived that violence and felt the daily fear that went with it. Any sense of righteousness about which side had the better argument was really beside the point.