Subverting Social Bad Behavior with Community Service

Summary: personal aha...spend equal time on your community as you do on social media, and everyone will be better for it.

The Local Buffoonery of Garden Variety

When I woke, it was because of the shouting. That usually doesn't happen in my neighborhood at two in the morning. I don't mean like "hey, you forgot your beer on top of your car" kind of shouting, I mean the kind with curses and violence into the darkness of night. When I finally sat up to look down onto the street, between the fuzzy patches I saw a local taxi service driver furiously shaking his fist at something down the street yelling things.

As he used his mobile phone to call the cops, there was time to lite a...non-uniform cigarette...and pace around right in the middle of the blindest corner in town. Four more real cigarettes later and five flashing, silent police vehicles quickly swarmed what's typically a peaceful daytime intersection that my apartment windows overlook. Two at a time, the tatted-up Ford Explorers sped away in the fisterly direction, leaving the final officer to take what I can only imagine was a confusing deposition and also a flashlight look-around to validate the driver's story.

Today, Sunday, I drove downtown to ask the daytime taxi dispatcher what happened. I was expecting that I'd also have to stop up at the police station to get their official statement of what happened, but the guy at the desk knew the whole story and was happy enough to spill. Here it is.

After an overly complicated girlfriend-plus-other-friend pickup, some mentally imbalanced passenger, seeing a fare that surprised him as far too high, escalated an argument about the fare to an unexpected roundhouse punch to the driver's head. That's right, with two other people in the back, he temporarily disabled someone with the responsibility of driving them all somewhere on Eastern Point.

How doped up or insane does a passenger have to be to attack the driver? Why is this ragtag group of weirdos proceeding to somewhere on Eastern Point (very affluent)? Movie stupid, very upset, either or both. The world is really, truly crawling with crazy, fucked up people at all levels (especially in politics). And, like taxi drivers, sometimes you don't have the economic luxury of pushing back on psychotic behavior when it comes your way because of what you do.

The Political Buffoonery of Friends and Neighbors

Assault is of course a crime...depending on who you are these days. It should be, it doesn't work at very large scale in the commons where most of us live. But for some reason, everyone from the well-educated to the god-fearing seem to think that it's open season on assaulting others who don't share their beliefs. When it happens verbally on local social media (in particular, Facebook), I step back and ask, "what side of all of this do you want to be on?"

Take this guy I'd hope to call a friend, Jam. Jam is all kinds of good and crazy and well-intentioned. He runs a local blog, or maybe a cemetery where overly opinionated blog posts go to die, I don't know at this point. Whatever he is, he's complicated. Sadly, and rightly so, the current political climate has turned him into an-eye-for-an-eye asshole on social media. A counterpoint-liberalist, we'll call him the Cook, recently said some things in response to Jam and other local liberals' boycotting a local business for some insensitive things the conservative owner said. This is like Spanky and Our Gang vs. the Little Rascals type bullshit. "Not beef", as some might call what this is.

This unwelcome display of reverse-perspective outreach sparked a knock-down, drag-out social media war between two individuals that are very reasonable when not provoked. But neither even saw what they were doing: focusing on the meta over the impact. Impact of their meta, more polarization. Opportunity cost of the meta over of useful action. Long-term impact of rejecting others' views and position on their journey, a.k.a. karma. Acceptance that there is a shared journey. Acknowledgement that they may be wrong, no matter how much they think they're right. That they are most certainly wrong if they think they're the only one's who can see something right. Complete subjectivity instead of focus on objective measures.

The result is that at least one of these parties is regretful and walking around hurt by it all. The worst thing is that I don't think it's my friend Jam. He still hasn't worked his ego problems out before diving headlong into 'other' advocacy with women's movement and anything else the overwhelmingly liberal-biased feeds feed him. All those things are good, but without love and respect, what good does it do for Jam to constantly interject himself?

It's all buffoonery until we do something useful with others, not flashy or geeky or memorable or unusual. Not something that gets you a group photo with Captain Picard at a fancy inherited wealth house or the following to argue to against Trump multiple times a day instead of showing up to community roundtables about how to improve local education. Speaking from this experience, it was nice to be in a place where everyone practiced listening as much as they practiced having a spine and a heart. This is what I and others did yesterday from 3-5pm downtown. I don't feel at all that way about the online shouting match Jam and the Cook participated in.

Don't Let Nationalism Buffoonery Legitimize Local Buffoonery

You may think, "I'm so different than what's going on politically right now, I need to speak out!" Please find more useful ways to argue with people over social media. Need solid reasons not to? How about that you won't be permanently quoted in exquisite online conversational detail by an article like the one you're reading now. How about, instead of counter-trolling, you could be sipping something nice right now. Fuck, anything but arguing with neighbors online.

Instead of escaping from the real world, think about how the way you view things affects those around you. How about that you don't want your check-in with captured moments of friends and family to be perforated by "what's trending" bullshit between town neighbors. Sure, share stories and articles that you've validated and make sense to you in various forums; but once an online conversation looks like it's getting nasty, politely move along. Don't let something as transparent and egotistical as "my blog swings 2,300 local votes" be your hood ornament. If people are being victimized, eject the violator and report their poor behavior.

In short, and to bring it full circle, don't let a culture precipitated by a talentless, washed-up genital wart of a President and his cargo cult nationalist, supremacy-retrograding base suck you in to the human-capital machines that Jack Doorsey and Mark Zuckerberg built but now take it with their pants on from Russian mafia-state. Find me instead and we'll identify something far more useful in our town to work on together. I've been collecting people's challenges, many of them just take a little bit of help from others to overcome.

If you can't be bothered to focus on useful activity over timespend on social media, at least try this: every minute you spend on social media this week, spend equal on something useful for the people who live around you. Can't think of what that might be? I've got some ideas handy:

• Donate supplies to a program that need it (this week, it was tampons)
• Walk around your neighborhood (or just your block) and pick up trash
• Clean up, repair something in, or just post pictures of a great little local park
• Engage others to write about their local views over just your small clique
• Prioritize and facilitate actionable community projects needing nothing more than hands and time to complete

When I see people not doing stuff like this, it's usually the folks that maybe don't deserve a seat at our community table. They like to bark, but don't like to dig. They look influential, but are really inconsequential. They are simply taxpayers, not community members.