Arguing with Myself Vol. 25B-XXI

Since the death of Philando Castile and the shooting of Charles Kinsey, all my posts seem petty and stupid. I’m outraged over gun violence because it’s turned formerly safe places into danger zones. But some people have no safe places. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and all the rest are tragic atrocities, but Castile and Kinsey finally made the reality clear for me. Those two did everything they could to defuse situations which shouldn’t have been tense in the first place, and they still got shot.

I have some good friends who are cops. I like and respect and admire them. I know their courage and integrity represent the majority of officers. I know they are up against some awful shit and deserve our support. But institutional racism is real. We have to do better.

Walking around without fear of getting shot is a privilege that everyone is entitled to.

Reinvention of Self (blue pill version)

Here’s a funny thought: on a typical day in real life, I interact with a dozen people at most. On Facebook, I’m having conversations with several hundred people. So which identity has more legitimacy?

More to the point: let’s say I wanted to reinvent myself. (I could go into just what that means and why it’s attractive but I’ll skip that part for now.) In real life, I’d have to keep a constant vigilance over my own unconscious tendencies in order to change my behavior. With social media, I can take the time to edit my behavior before releasing it into the universe. It wold take some effort to craft and maintain my ideal identity online, but it seems a much easier prospect than wrangling my natural failings in realtime.

If you tell me that my real-life self is the inherent real me in a way that my online self can never be, I won’t argue. But as The Fixx said, It’s not what we are, it’s what we do. If I’m interacting with 20-30 times more people online, isn’t my online self the one with the greater impact? Isn’t it reasonable to measure ourselves by our affect on others, rather than some philosophical construct of self?

I suppose it’s likely that my little online missives have a very small impact on a lot of people, while my real life behavior has a larger impact on those close to me. But maybe, if I work long and hard to make my online self into my ideal, those habits and behaviors will spill over into my real life.

Seems like it’s worth a shot.