11. History happens every day
A thing I think about maybe more than I should is that there’s little I can do in my daily life to combat sociopolitical shit happening mostly elsewhere, mostly out of my sphere of personal influence.—and the things I do are not online.
Is what I do enough? No. But here’s the thing. Nothing is enough. Nothing ever was. Thinking that way is what got us into this mess. There’s not going to be A Big Hero. Systems don’t change until they do. In the modern era FDR and LBJ came the closest of any political leaders in the US, and their victories weren’t nearly as sweeping or as clean as history texts make them seem.
In most online spaces and no small amount of media, there’s a persistent existential doom-guilt loop of “All this is horrible, something has to be done, what are you doing right now?” As if people are not fighting injustice with every cell of their being every waking moment, they’re bad people.
And they’re not. The phrase “there’s nothing new under the sun” is as old as Eccelsiastes (prolly older, I’m sure) and the world going to hell in a hand basket has been going on as long as the world has been going anywhere.
The only new part is the way all of it is in our faces everywhere, every day, all day long. That, historically, is not the way people perceived the world around them. Immediate corresponded with local. Urgency was connected more securely to immediacy. What you could sense, you could affect. What you could sense was what would affect you. Events elsewhere, no matter how important, were elsewhere, literally out of reach. Out of sight, out of mind.
Knowing distant things matter is important. Empathy means having the imagination to care beyond the immediate and the local.
But. Being bombarded with news of the whole world’s trauma, genocide, and callous evil makes it hard to concentrate on the part of the world we can affect most powerfully. The part we can see, touch, hear on a daily basis.
That’s all I’m saying. Think global, act local is more than a glib activist motto. It’s a warning to focus on what can be done, as much if not more than what needs to be done. No matter how important the big picture is, it’s too MUCH. Knowledge is power, but staying too connected to knowledge of the world is about as safe as staring at the sun without eye protection.