I’ve spent the last few months entirely off social media, months that I’ve been instead using for reading, writing a screenplay, grieving a pal, listening to podcasts, going outside, walking, hanging out with my friends and family, picking apples, going for runs, writing cards, writing lists.

It’s been bliss.

Here are some thoughts that have begun to coalesce in my mind during that time:

1. Instagram seems like the least hostile social media app, going by who I follow, but when I’ve opened it recently I’ve felt like my disgruntled old white dad™ complaining about The Youth. “But why are you taking a photograph of your food? Your blanket? Your train journey? Who cares about it? Why can’t you just enjoy your holiday? Who are you writing this to?” 

2. I think one of the reason it bothers me is that so many of the people I follow who talk about anxiety and mental health issues are also the most prolific posters, particularly of selfies. I wonder if we’ll look back on this era of internet-use and marvel that it wasn’t obvious, a direct correlation between filming/photographing yourself and waiting for comments and likes, and anxiety and mental health issues. 

3. In the first episode of Morality in the 21st Century, the much-discussed and critiqued author Jordan Peterson talks to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about how we now put far too much emphasis on Happiness, way beyond Responsibility. How fulfilment and the pleasure of life comes from accepting and handling responsibility, not chasing constant ‘happiness and rights’. Peterson also says kids shouldn’t be told they are perfect and that they should love themselves unconditionally because self-esteem is so important, but instead that they are full of potential, and have a responsibility to tap into that infinite potential to grow into the best possible version of themselves within and against the problems and issues they’ll come up against. I dig this. 

4. I try to raise our kids to be like Paddington. Open-hearted, hopeful, adventurous, curious, moral, questioning, kind. I don’t know if it’ll work. But it helps to have a plan. 

5. I want to side with my generation and younger. My optimism says that young people have fresh ideas, open minds, new ways of understanding old bigotries are no longer acceptable. Young people shouldn’t be dictated to about what is and isn’t acceptable by older generations who don’t understand and haven’t grown up with technology in the same way. But for all that optimism, I realise I’ve thrown out the idea of Wisdom. If anyone older than us says anything we don’t agree with, it’s way easier to say, “OMG the 1800s called and want their ideology back.” But maybe they know something. Maybe it is super rude and disconnected for a family to sit together on a sofa all on separate tablets and phones. Maybe it’s not acceptable for everyone to have their phones out on the table when they’re out for dinner. Maybe we should be able to unplug and walk outside in the fresh air without having to take seventeen pictures of it, select our favourite, caption it, publish it, then check and respond to comments. Maybe living a life through images and captions isn’t how our human brains work best. 

6. (Maybe it also makes you a little bit boring.) 

7. I still grieve for Twitter — even though even glimpsing four tweets on my feed now makes my heart pound and race at the sheer teeth-bared ferocity of it — but I miss the memes and the humour, the people I met there and the opinions I discovered. I love that it gives previously silenced people a vital platform. That’s so important. I can’t say that enough. That’s SO important. 

8. But! Of course, but! Having a platform for everyone means that everyone has a platform. And actually, I feel that’s less good. But I don’t know how to fix that, or run it better. Gatekeepers aren’t the answer. Moral responsibility? “Do I need to post this?” Does it make the world better? Is calling someone trash when they’ve done something ‘wrong’ the right way to live? Do you ever worry that one day it’ll be you? 

9. I do, loads. The more that people are deleted for their errors — a word, a tweet, a joke, a routine, a casting decision, a drunken error — jesus christ, when I think of all my drunken errors and jokes and god, all my mistakes, my god — the more I wonder how anyone dares use social media. (I will shortly be crowd-funding my family’s move to a signal-less home on a hill in beautiful Wales.)

10. This makes me feel like all the people we used to loathe and make fun of, in my Twitter days. Just don’t be human garbage! The rules aren’t hard! But they really, really are. 

11. Do you remember when we disagreed with things and said to people or companies, “Do you think you might -” or “Please could you consider -”? It feels — and I haven’t crunched the numbers! I don’t know if this is nonsense! I hope it is! — that we go full-throttle straight to SIGN THIS PETITION TO GET THIS SHUT DOWN. I like it more when we talk about things. We all need to be challenged.  

12. This is an excellent programme on the vital importance of Dialogue. While I’ve been offline I’m been meeting so many people to just chat and hang out and it turns out it’s great. We should do that more. (*extremely high pitched suggestion voice* And maybe not put that we did it on social media??)

13. These apps are engineered by the top engineers to be addictive. It doesn’t mean they fulfil you. 

14. I, like most late-twentieth-century babies, went through an anti-religion phase. Now, most of the religious people I know are the ones I feel best after seeing. Their quiet charity. Their humility. Their morals. It’s not a sword they use to strike people, it’s an umbrella they offer to hold over those who want it. It’s pretty nice. (And I’d love to discuss with people who have greater expertise than me about whether the fact that almost all religions across the last few thousand years have said vanity/self-indulgence are Not Good Things is suggestive that maybe we should avoid those for our greater benefit, or whether those taboos have been tools of oppression. Both? Probably. I would like to learn more, though.) 

15. Getting paid and credited for your work is important — god knows, I try to make my living in a field where anyone who speaks English is convinced they can do it NO YOU CANNOT — but entering an Instagram space where everyone, always, bangs their own drum is so tiresome. I know I can unfollow them. But how much can that behaviour be repeated and normalised before we forget it’s not the way to shape a pleasant society? And yes, I am also a bitter writer who is not yet rolling in my own Scrooge McDuck coin vault so that’s probably part of it. I don’t even remember the original question asked here, but I think about paragraphs 11 & 12 of the answer all the time. When did ‘building your brand’ replace being an actual person? And I know I’m on thin ice here, I can already hear the retorts, and yes, I am 187 years old, thank you for asking. 

16. I am so, so, so worried about the planet. Everything else kind of feels like small fry, in a way. Please stop encouraging people to buy so much shit. It might be your living but we are literally, literally destroying the only place we have to live. I just don’t get why this isn’t the only thing we are all working on, all the time. (I mean, I get why, but also, WHY?) That Morality podcast I mentioned earlier has an interesting discussion on the value of capitalism that utterly fails to reference the fairly pressing point of “it’s basically ending humanity with its poisoning of water, air and land”. 

17. If I’m not writing, I want to spend my time making things with my hands. This podcast posits that the thing that makes humans happiest to hold is a wooden object. Fuck you, Apple designers! Lol. Anyway, I could believe it. I want to carve wood for a useful purpose and make things from clay and repair things with beautiful stitches and fix objects so they are useful and gorgeous. 

18. Picking and forming teams seems dangerous. It means the other teams are your enemy. That they can’t understand you, that you don’t get them, and that ultimately you aren’t on the same side. 

19. Someone disagreeing with you is not your enemy. It is not a weakness nor an act of aggression to say, “I’m not sure about this. I feel this way at the moment, but I’d like to know more.”  

20. I think if we talk a lot about Fear and Hate and Catastrophe it’s hard to see around those words to what we can do as individual people, rather than being stuck on one side or another of them. It doesn’t mean we ignore those issues: maybe we just try to listen to people we disagree with more. 

21. When I was young, books and films and culture told me that you know less as you get older, not more. Ha! Boy, did they have that wrong! I learned more every day! 

22. Up to a point. Now I know almost nothing, except that at the moment I believe Paddington to be a suitable role-model for my kids, and that there is almost never a clear right answer to anything. 

23. I don’t know how much of this is right. 

Here are the podcasts I’ve mentioned: 

Hidden Brain, Our Better Nature 

Morality in the 21st Century, episode 1

Hidden Brain, The Cassandra Curse 

The Persistence of Analogue 

Double-Talk - I’m really sorry, this isn’t available to download. Darn it. But if you meet me in a caff you can listen to it on my headphones. It’s worth it for the price of a £1.80 latte. 

Instagram is my sole 21st-century vice these days, keeping me in touch with friends and far-off family. It lacks the wicked humour of Twitter, but it does shield me from Twitter’s apoca-rages of public shaming and vibrating despair at our hurtling handbasket of a world; the strangers I follow on Instagram are generally more calmly constructive about Next Steps (‘here’s how to get in touch with your MP’/‘here are some alternatives to the products that might be v v bad for the environment’ etc). My vice within that vice are lifestyle bloggers, ranging from fashion to interiors, food to fitness, travel to parenting. And while we’re all distracted by the gnarled new shapes current external pressures are forming us into, a couple of things are super noticeable right now. 

1. Boy oh boy, do these guys make me want to never buy anything ever again*. Every new pair of sunglasses, new sofa, new dungarees, new phone cover, new coffee pot and enamel plate and blanket and trainers and paint – I think of the unlikelihood that these products are 100% recycled, or not made by exploited workers somewhere along the production chain, or aren’t costing us clean air, clean water, vital forests, unique habitats. (Spoilers: no, we’re still mostly treating our planet like we can get a new one from TK Maxx once this one’s broken) 

2. The replacement of meaningful, tough – and perhaps flawed – spirituality with that of the god(dess) of Self. Fine, many of us might not believe in a bearded man up in the sky/(insert appropriate variation), but the endless search for self, for improvement of self, for the soothing of self seems not just pointless, but actively bad in these quick-fix forms. On one blogger’s Instagram story today, a company had sent a free product along with some boosting text: “Give yourself permission to say no/make a list of your achievements today/get a full night’s sleep/go outside, move your body/indulge in your sensitive side” and topped it all with a large card bearing the text “Put yourself first and everything else will follow”. Now, for all I know, these cards could have been the final words in a package consisting of 400 pages of campaigning notes for intersectional feminism, workers’ rights and environmental protection, but it does staaaaart to feel like what was once a thoughtful Tumblr hashtag to support people with mental health issues has become 99% of the world behaving as though they’re recovering from a deep PTSD. Which they probably are, fuck it, look at us right now. hashtag literally all recent elections

My point is: there’s a reason major cultural organisations throughout time (aka religions) put humility, charity and selflessness way up there on the Thumbs Up scale. (REMINDER: Donna and Tom celebrated Treat Yo Self Day once a year, guys, not every time they connected to the internet. ONCE A YEAR.) Yes, I need to get good sleep and breathe some fresh air and carve some space out for myself in my busy life. But jesus, do you know what generally makes me feel better than all of that? Helping someone else. 

You’ll meet new people! You’ll gain amazing skills! You’ll actually have specific jobs to do, so can more often than not feel like you’ve made the world slightly better with only a single hour or two from your week! 

Here are some good places to start – if anyone wants to send me any more (supporting immigrant families? mental health? sexuality? wider conservation?) I’d be delighted to add to the list: 

The Samaritans Great training, varied shifts, listen to someone other than the anxious voice in your brain. 

Home Start Full training to support families with young children for a couple of hours a week. 

Age UK Offering visits, phone calls or day service support to older people who may be suffering from loneliness. 

Contact the Elderly Tea parties! Who doesn’t like tea parties! Driving guests to the parties once a month, or hosting in your home. 

Rethink Good training to support people suffering from mental health issues (or their families) across the UK. 

The Woodland Trust Count seeds, guide some tours, speak at schools. I <3 trees. 

Canal & River Trust Hang out with Good People as you litter-pick, de-weed, check boats and welcome visitors around the waterways. 

Guides/Brownies/Scouts/Cubs/whatever I don’t feel like I could actually do this one for all the brownies in the land (PUN INTENDED) because I am frightened of children I can’t legally call Maggots and carry around by their ankles, but every volunteer I’ve met in these fields was just the nicest. We love you, brave people. 

Please send more, if you have any suggestions. Charity shops, community centres, religious centres, even assisting local councillors, if you don’t like what’s happening in your area with schools/hospitals/parks/housing…  

Good luck out there. It can feel pretty sweet. 

*not legally binding

All links mentioned are clustered at the end, if you’d like to read/listen to them too.

I’ve never been one for the middle road, in habits, emotions or tendencies, but if there’s one thing 2016 has taught me — I hope — it’s that it’s possible for me. At last. I’ve been more willing, as I’ve grown fractionally older, to welcome the change of heart that time and experience bring; I’ve been more likely to say, ‘Well, this is how I feel at the moment, but who knows,’ rather than, ‘No! Never! Impossible!’ Only there have been some hold-outs from this: some political groups, some voting histories, some educational choices, anti-freedom groups, hate groups. Thankfully, they could all be bundled up in my mind as Big Bads, so I didn’t need to ever fear that I could be wrong about any of them: and if someone had expressed those choices, even once, even in error or misunderstanding or drunkenness or foolishness, or ever been associated with anyone who’d expressed those choices, then great! Into the barrel of doom with them, and good riddance!

I have loved so much of social media, so much of the quickness of thought to make the jokes, dark or otherwise, because that’s how I see the world. The kindness, too: those people who tap a “xxx” or a digital embrace to someone suffering. I’ve been at both ends of that, and it feels good.

2016, however, and everything we’re seeing unfold from that and the last few years before it, has made me wonder at the meaningfulness of these interactions. Other people than me have written about this, probably better than me, and research can show whatever we want it to (also known as ‘2016’s catchphrase’) but some gut instinct in me has hollered louder and louder than social media does nothing, for me, in quite a major way. I’m sure anyone who’s reading this can give me some counter arguments — friendships, business contacts, social and political movements — but there is a hollowness to my life on there. On here, I suppose I should say. Having been mostly off it for several months now, I can see with greater clarity that the time I spend with friends and family on sofas and bar stools and around kitchen tables, without photos, or hashtags, or tagging, or comments, just ephemeral conversation and moments that are gone forever: these times have been better for me, and have filled some deeper need.

And of course social media can be an educational, fascinating place. It’s hilarious to suggest otherwise. So congratulations and a big shiny medal to me if I now understand that Black Lives Matter, or grasp the violence that faces the average transgender man or woman, or see that even the most supportive, feminist man occasionally uses language and jokes that chip away at the average woman. Those fights are easy to understand and easier to engage in. 

But – and here’s the tricky bit – how much time did I give, really, to thinking about why someone would support and vote and fight and hurt people for beliefs opposite to mine? It’s not comfortable to defend these people, to acknowledge that they are human and have family they love and interests they believe to be best. It’s not easy to say, in my circles, But What About Straight White Men, when we’ve had such a bloody great time turning them into the butt of every smart, knowing, accurate, deserved joke. But the number of people I know on social media who are actively trying to make the world better (could count on two hands) rather than just spitting into someone’s online soup (thousands) is worth my consideration, if I’m spending hours a day with them. And the things we’ve hated in those hours! We hate this film. This politician is trash. That TV programme is shit — look at this gif about it! The readers of those newspapers are just a dumpster fire of burning garbage.

So this is what I’ve concluded, after much thinking and reading and listening: that there are two issues here. Two things that tie my feelings about social media and my feelings about what’s on social media together: firstly, nuance, and secondly, opportunity versus morality.

Nuance, as Jon Ronson (a man who’s had his share of online kickings) says on the Guys We’ve Fucked podcast*, is wildly unfashionable now. Pick a side! Quickly! Don’t worry about circumstance, or history, or mis-readings, or context! Just go go go get our boots on and pile in! My online bubble that I’ve been happy to cosy up in seems the same: straight white guys: be quiet. Leave voters: racists. Republicans: racist misogynist climate-change deniers who should also be quiet. It doesn’t matter why they feel that way. Let’s just remind them as forcibly as we can that they are hateful humans we don’t want to dirty our hands with, and that’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget! After seeing our scorching memes, they’ll be thinking like we do in no time! Except: they are actual people. Everyone’s frightened of something, and whether or not I agree with the veracity of the source of that fear, they’re still feeling afraid. They still have goals, which I may or may not agree with, but those goals won’t change if I tell them their goals are trash. In an episode of the Invisibilia podcast* called Flip the Script, Hanna Rosin visits Aarhus to talk to the police who decided to stop prosecuting young Muslim men travelling to Syria to fight for Isis, and instead engaged with them, offering them care and support, employment and housing. They made them feel like they were welcome in Denmark, that this was their home, and in 2015, even when traffic was spiking from Europe, only one individual left Aarhus to fight. In the programme, Jamal, a young Danish muslim, says of his feelings before this positive intervention received him, ‘I thought: they call me terrorist? I will give them a terrorist.’ Treat those we disagree with as racists, as misogynists, as bigots, as fascists, and guess how they’ll be tempted to behave. (Side note: It’s also really worth listening to the Adam Buxton conversations* with Richard Ayoade, Iain Lee and Jon Ronson (again!) talking from various different angles about kindness, nuance, context, and how it feels to be a Woody Allen fan these days. Also, there’s a stand-up routine by Louis CK – helloooo, problematic public figure – which also covers nicely the idea of correctly using The Right Terms but having not great goals with it, and being pummelled for using Incorrect Language but wanting to communicate positive ideas. I can’t link to it as it autoplayed on Netflix while I was painting the hall, but the thought was pretty smart.)

As Oliver Burkeman said in his This Column Will Change Your Life piece*, it’s moderation that’s key to a better world, not battling for victory. No one really ever wins a war. As This American Life’s podcast* on Reconsideration showed, it’s giving people a chance to be listened to that offers that chance to change minds, not shouting them down with facts that will only make them dig their heels in harder. Anger is a vital political tool, but my anger too often feels like hatred, or disdain, or dismissal. It serves no purpose. It’s a toxic, pixelled sledgehammer. It makes the world worse. I’ve really been doing a shitty job at making things nicer, guys. 

Secondly: opportunity versus morality. As part of my feminist beliefs, I’ve been pro-Instagram; why should some dude tell me what I can and can’t photograph? If people like my lunch pic, what’s wrong with that? If I look great and want to record and share it, what the hell is your problem? Only suddenly, as I’ve been using it less and less, Instagram looks so lonely to me. I think of the humans at the end of Wall-E, tapping their screens and never looking up, and that’s how it feels: I like the sunset someone else has photographed while I’m missing it because I’m looking at my phone. And even if I’m snapping it myself to share — what am I missing by not just looking at the damn thing, and letting it pass through me, a beautiful gift to warm my soul? Do I really believe the tech ads about how much better a father’s night in the woods is with his kid because he brought their tablet along? I know the feeling in me when I pick up my phone to take a picture of something with the intention of sharing it, and it feels like a greasy, dizzy dilution. For me, it’s not about the over-curation of our perfect online lives, but about the inability to live in my offline life without outside approval. I’m not having real fun until 20, 50, 1000 people have liked it too! 

And putting that smartphone opportunity up against my moral code: just because we can do something, should we? If I can live-tweet a couple arguing on a train journey, does that make it not nightmarishly intrusive? If I Instagram a photo of someone in a terrible outfit, does that make me a warrior for underprivileged rights? If I pause every lunch with friends to take photos to post online for others to view and like or not like, am I connecting more, or less? Am I making the world a more claustrophobic, judgemental, short-sighted place if I collude in this weird global surveillance?

And god knows, I’m a hypocrite. I’ve been mean as mean can be, online and off-, about people whose political views I disagree with. I’ve Instagrammed my Christmas day lunches, my children’s artwork, my brunches with friends, my views from a train. But why have I interrupted the flow of conversation or silence before the play started to post a picture of the theatre stage and ceiling? Why have I unintentionally asked my family to hold off from eating because I wanted a picture of the meal I’ve just made? Why did I stop thinking about whatever I was thinking about just to snap an image of the sky? I’ve thought and thought and can’t get any further than Because other people might like it. Which is, to me, right now, at this moment, fathomlessly sad. (But who knows how I’ll feel next week, a year from now, twenty years from now?)

Have some ideas on social media changed me? Of course. People and articles have educated me hugely in ways that have hopefully made me a better person. But do those new, positive and instructive ideas warrant staying on social media? Not at the moment. Twitter is a thousand people shouting apocalypse at me, Facebook is an algorithmic sink and Instagram is an endless time-suck scroll of kids I’m not playing with, art I’m not making, trips I’m not taking, food I’m not cooking, homes I’m not helping people into, chances I’m not helping others receive, political aspirations I’m not supporting because I’m just swiping my finger along this screen tap tap tap swipe tap swipe tap swipe swipe swipe…

But right now, I’m trying to make changes. I’m off twitter, I’ve deleted my Facebook profile, I’ve turned my Instagram to private and am slowly weaning myself off it (I still hit like at what I’m seeing, but the (v good, v scary) Moment app is also making me realise how much of my day — my life — is lost to tapping a heart icon on a flat screen next to a photograph someone else has taken that ultimately means nothing to me as pixels on a screen). The cards, notes, emails and texts I’ve sent and received over the last month or two have made me realise how much more valuable these quiet interactions are to me at the moment. I think about the adults I’d like our kids to grow up into: outward-facing, forward-looking, clear-eyed, generous with their time, generous with their thoughts, independent, handy (all the way from cooking and cleaning, through to crafting and mending and building), confident, kind. And it doesn’t matter that I’m thinking of it in terms of my kids: like those men we laugh at for only finding feminism once they have a daughter (who cares why they found it! they found it! they’re engaging!) it’s not about whether or not I have children. It’s about which adults we want to share the world with. Adults we might disagree with, but whom we could hopefully rely on for respectful conversation, thoughtfulnesss, retreat on either side, apologies, space for error, learning, growth, change.

I’m not saying we should forgive anyone who asks for it — only maybe I am, because what does the alternative produce? And I’m not saying we should love everyone in the world, no matter what they’ve done in the past or continue to do in the future — only I guess, I suppose, perhaps, maybe I actually am, because hating people feels shit, does nothing, and makes the world boring and hate-filled and dead. We’ve tried that! We’ve tried telling men/cis/white women/privileged feminists/baby boomers/Tories/right-wingers/Brexit supporters/homophobes/transphobes/racists/abusers/Cameron that they’re just a crapsack, nothing but a punchline, should get pushed off their soapbox or fixie or 4x4 or youtube channel into the fiery pits of hell! We’ve let the warmth of righteous indignation warm us at night and not minded the language we use against our enemies because look at the way they’ve treated us! Look at the terrible things they’ve done! So we hurl insults and craft jokes and smash bridges with our pixel sledgehammers and wait for the likes and retweets and thumbs up and YEAH comments to flood in, and if they do then our point is proved, good work, and if they don’t then maybe we up it a bit more next time.

(Or sometimes, I wonder if it’s all a handy distraction from the way we’re treating our planet at the moment, like gum we can replace at the corner shop once we’ve chewed all the goodness from it. That’s frightening. That’s genuinely sick-in-the-night, silent panic-attack terrifying. But we buy new phones and new phone covers and charge them up and snap a picture of ourselves with them in the mirror and grind our teeth that some dude took up too much space on the tube and Steven Moffatt can’t write women. Yes! Those things might be true! But, to play the card we all dislike the most: haven’t we got other things to worry about? Not necessarily bigger things, or better things, but fractionally more pressing things? Shouldn’t we all be hurling money as hard as we can at scientists and policy makers in the hope we can stop sawing down and burning up the only home we’ve got? Shouldn’t we be campaigning against companies who design their products with built-in obsolescence, rather than grabbing those products as fast as we can so we can use them to tweet our rage at companies who use unreliable delivery companies? And I understand that climate change isn’t a stand-alone issue — capitalism, our lifestyles, our conditioned social priorities, corporate power over government, dissolution of employment rights, exploitation of workers — all of this feeds into climate change and the terrible way we’re treating our planet. I understand this. And all of it feels slightly more pressing than how I can correctly display my individualism to people who don’t or barely know me.)

The fact remains, the basic philosophies of most major religions (if we put aside meat specifics and some potentially dodgy sex/marriage stuff) throughout human civilisation probably have a point: care for the needy; practice humility; think of others; show forgiveness; show respect; love everyone.

If the future looks scary, the answer isn’t to build the wall higher and sharpen our words. It’s so painful, and it’s so difficult, and it’s so simple. Right now, if we can take the time to type our disdain and disgust, we’re in a privileged enough position to take a deep breath, dive into life, and make a better choice.

1. *Jon Ronson on Guys We’ve Fucked

2. *Invisibilia, Flip the Script

3. *Richard Ayoade on Adam Buxton 

4. *Iain Lee on Adam Buxton

5. *Jon Ronson on Adam Buxton

6. *Oliver Burkeman, ‘Moderates are the real tough guys’ 

7. *This American Life, For Your Reconsideration

Oops.

I remember sitting on my sofa one cold, dark January afternoon in 2009, watching Barack Obama being inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. I squeezed my infant daughter and howled with bursting joy, tears streaming down my face, at the hope and goodness this seemed to offer us all. The world seemed brighter the next day. It felt like millions of people had all done something good at once, and that choice would make life better for millions more people.

It was wonderful.

This, now, is not so good. Despite Clinton winning the popular vote by more than 630,000, the American people now have someone noooooooot greeeeaaaaat due to move in to the White House in the next few months, someone still wholly focused on criminalising abortion and deporting immigrants. Not only that, the Republican party have control of the House and the Senate. Here in the UK, Theresa May, she of the “Go Home, Immigrants” vans is powering through the process to trigger Article 50, despite the EU Referendum being explicitly an advisory, rather than a binding, referendum, because I guess 38% of the voting public saying, ‘Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of this madhouse where an innocent man isn’t even allowed to tell a few harmless racist jokes?’ is evidence enough to ignore a sweeping majority of economists, environmentalists, business leaders, charities, party leaders, and the governor of the Bank of England etc etc. (I know, I know, that’s how democracy™ works. I know.) And the opposition ahaha opposition hahaha the opposition, Labour, are hahahah… well. Their position is best summed up here, I think. 

BUT! But. I have had a revelation. And like all my revelations, it was someone else’s first. This thread by Marco Rogers is both brilliant and accurate: we white liberals are to blame for this. And I know that blame isn’t in short supply right now, and it doesn’t do a whole lot of anything on its own, but bear with me, because this is important to accept before we begin more productive work.

Our white liberal gang learnt, eventually, that racism and misogyny and homophobia came in all shapes and sizes, could be internalised and institutional, could be your aunt and uncle at Christmas, could be the security guard following your black Twitter friend around her local department store. We listened to these stories, and we gradually, piece by piece, started to begin to be able to slightly conceive of what life is like if you aren’t white, straight, able-bodied, let alone male etc etc. Turns out: straight white people, collectively, often treat everyone else below them on the ladder of privilege pretty badly. Surprise!

But it’s hard to address police racism. It’s tricky to question why your company seems to promote only young men. It’s difficult to get parliament to answer why ethnic minorities are three times less likely to crop up as MPs than as average British citizens. But it is easy to stop visiting your racist aunt and uncle. You can go drinking with someone other than the uni friend who still makes ironic jokes about women in the kitchen. You can avoid the parents in the playground who make reference to ‘Gyppos’. It’s easy. And ahhhhhhhhhhhh, doesn’t it feel better? Isn’t it nice to be on a high-horse, unsullied by relationships with those ignorant, bigoted, Torygraph-reading stress-triggers? Ooooh, that’s good.

The trouble is, as Marco Rogers said in his brief and pithy tweets: it doesn’t actually help. In fact, it makes things worse.

If you’re engaged with gently by people you trust and respect — the People Like Us of the white world :( — and you share conversations, and anecdotes, and are shown different ideas, and asked, quietly, privately, to imagine the life of someone very different to you, and it’s pointed out to you very softly to name the last black UK party leader, or the last panel show that featured more than one ethnic minority at once, or to look at the way newspaper front pages frame and feature white middle-class people compared to working-class, or Pakistani, or gay, or disabled, or women, or eastern European, and you start to talk about immigration history in your family history, maybe — JUST MAYBE — you might start to absorb little tiny fractions of new ideas and thoughts and feelings. Maybe.

On the other hand, if you’re constantly told you’re racist, and misogynist, and homophobic, and all the other tropes and memes that might well be totally true, but whatever, because would you listen? Would you google that meme to even get the facts hidden in it? Would you engage thoughtfully and with an open mind to your Facebook pages filled with friends and relatives spitting bile and fury? And I get it, I really do. I feel that bile and fury, and I burn inside with the injustice of the world, but still. It’s our fault.

Because it’s not the job of those who are suffering to comfort those stamping them down. It’s not the job of the people who systematically or individually get paid less, arrested more, are offered fewer opportunities, and receive more physical and verbal abuse, to educate the white Western world about how shittily we behave almost all the time. It’s our job. To talk to our friends, our neighbours, our family, those people we’ve fenced ourselves off from because they say things we morally disagree with — we need to start talking again. Our echo chambers do nothing. It makes us feel good, but it doesn’t actually change minds. We need to rebuild our communities, and make them inclusive, this time. Of everybody. ♫We, white liberals, don’t get to walk away from this♫

And — side note — every journo publishing a piece about how we’re heading into WW3 and all its attendant horrors: we might WELL be, yes, god, probably, but do you know what fear does? It paralyses. It makes us unable to think properly, to make sensible, long-term decisions, it makes it harder to put others first, it makes our brains freeze and nothing gets changed. Instead of focusing on the echoes of the 1930s, why don’t we put our heads together to work out how we can do things differently! Talk to our neighbours about what we’re scared of! Let them talk about what they’re scared of! Even if it’s nonsense! Build up a relationship! I know it’s draining but it’s a hell of a lot better than strengthening our bubbles and calling out ‘Hope you minorities are ok out there!’ while we raise solidarity fists through the walls!

And — new but related side note — I love Twitter, I love it, but I also think that for the last year or so, it’s not the greatest place in the world in which to hang out. It’s wonderful for raising awareness of big, sweeping issues like #BlackLivesMatter, and for trivial, wonderful, hilarious things like the Olympics opening ceremony, and Eurovision — my god, Eurovision on Twitter is everything good in the world — but Twitter is 140 characters per tweet. Even if you link tweets together, you’re still standing on a street corner with a megaphone. Which sometimes is great! Sometimes that’s what those situations demand! But in terms of nuance, and debate, and subtlety, and learning something completely contradictory to your previous beliefs, it’s not ideal. It’s the same behaviour that makes me want to weep when I watch PMQs, or Question Time, or even just the news these days. Stop shouting just to show you’re cleverest! Stop confusing one-liners with communication! Stop trying to win this conversation! And again: I’m guilty of all of this. Retweeting articles that made me furious. Laughing at bigots. Unfollowing or blocking Tories in my timeline. And in my life.

It doesn’t actually make sense.

I don’t know. I’m exhausted, and frightened, and angry, and my hope sometimes feels like naivety, but come on, guys: passing around articles about the awfulness of our enemies doesn’t seem to be working for anyone, does it? If you’re in a position of privilege, at any level, use your spider senses and admit that with that great privilege comes great responsibility. And maybe it’s time to accept ours.