As birds are wont to do, the Canary packed her nest up and headed south for a much-needed vacation this week. I don’t know what it is about the holidays, but apparently, it’s family time in the bird world, too. She’ll be back soon, but without her, you loyal canary column readers are stuck with me this week.
It’s been a crazy year, and as usual, it feels like it just started yesterday, and in one week 2014 will be over. And sometimes, I have to pinch myself to even believe what this year has brought to the Sun. I started out the year as a staff writer, pumping out stories about the Discovery Museum’s turnaround, the long-running North/South Santa Barbara County riff, and the now world-famous California drought. I’m ending the year as the paper’s managing editor, juggling staffing changes—of which there have been a few—and pumping out stories about the 2014 election, fights at Ernest Righetti High School, and water.
Thinking back, what sticks out about 2014 in news are the terrible things. It’s kind of depressing. The Isla Vista shooting and fights at Righetti move to the top of the list, as do the things we can’t cover as your community paper: the nationwide struggle to deal with immigration policy and the stupidity of our elected officials, the riots in Ferguson, and the decisions that have been made by grand juries when it comes to officer-involved killings.
But, the thing that really sticks out is the way people responded to those terrible things, the comments we make when we come across things we don’t like or disagree with, the way we forcefully insert ourselves into the issues in a way that really shows off how much we don’t know about the issue. Speaking our piece just to be heard, and using a gigantic voice-amplifier called the Internet to do it.
Nothing against the Internet: I think it’s fantastic, and and the amount of information we’re privy to because of it is tremendous. We can communicate with people halfway across the world, keep tabs on family, and have conversations about the big issues of the day.
But there are two ways we have these conversations. They’re either constructive or destructive. And if you’re anything like me, and I’m assuming you are because we’re both human—when an issue that grabs us pops up, we get Internet-obsessed with it. Take the Ferguson decision, which came out just before Thanksgiving.
Remember? National media went bonkers about the riots that were repeated in the wake of a grand jury decision that a white police officer didn’t use unnecessary force in an officer-involved shooting that killed an unarmed black man. The media was right to go crazy over all of it. The national conversation that followed should still be happening.
It seems like everyone had an opinion about riots and police shootings and racism and Ferguson and what was right and wrong. Racism on social media posted and re-posted. Rants on social media posted and re-posted. Articles and opinion pieces about Ferguson posted and re-posted. And, it seemed like every single one of those posts aligned perfectly with the views of whomever was doing the posting, and if someone disagreed with a post, the comments inevitably turned into a name-calling contest.
Let’s also look at the events at Righetti. The fights that happened between students and police officers shut down the school for a day and reverberated into the days that followed. Social media went high school crazy. Everyone had an opinion about the teenagers involved and their parents, the police officer involved, the school and its history, and why it all happened. People were downright nasty to each other about it.
I try not to insert myself into these conversations:
- A) because I’m a journalist.
- B) because I don’t want to have that conversation with what is essentially a computer screen.
- And C) because it seems inevitable that each thread that starts about an issue digresses into name-calling.
Destructive.
Why can’t we have a constructive conversation about issues like these? Because it’s political? Because it screws with our views of the world? Because we’ve been pushed to the very edge of our viewpoints and don’t know how to go back to finding common ground from which to continue having a productive discussion?
It feels like a depressing reflection about the state of our nation. This democratic, progressive nation birthed and built on the backs of self-reliance and capitalism. Of determination and working things out in a cohesive, compromising way where one side of an issue listens to the others.
It’s a reflection of talk shows, of cable “news” channels, of the endless lengths we seem to go to just to prove we’re right. Of conversations breaking down into a contest of who can sling the biggest insult at someone else that all started with one person calling the other an “idiot” for thinking the way that they do. Of Congress not being able to come to enough of a consensus to actually govern.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
And here we’ve come into a new year. One where we can start over with a clean slate. One where we can have important conversations about the gigantic issues of our day—of racism and the militarization of our police force, of school shootings and what it means about us as a nation, of immigration policy and where we need to go with it, of an unmoving Congress, of political views that are so far away from one another that consensus is impossible, of our communities, our children, our education system, and ourselves—without succumbing to the instinct to berate those who don’t agree with us. Let’s listen to each other and think about the opinion someone has taken the time to give us, so we can respond in a thoughtful way.
That way those conversations don’t stop, because they do stop. They go away until the next big terrible thing comes up. Let’s continue to have those conversations in a constructive way, so they don’t go away, so we don’t forget about them, and we can come to a consensus about how to prevent these terrible things from happening again.
Managing Editor Camillia Lanham is looking forward to a clean slate. Email her at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 25, 2014 – Jan 1, 2015.
