Beyond BLM. The Practicalities of Sowing Division.
Are you feeling frustrated and angry lately with what you’re seeing on the news and particularly on your social media feed?
Let’s all take a moment to step back and take a collective breath for one second.
Let’s look at a bigger picture. One that is being missed while we’re in a highly-emotionally charged place.
Remember the 2016 election? Oh, how could you forget…we live the after-effects of it every day.
Remember the investigation into Russian troll farms that spread misinformation on both sides of the Democrat/Republican split?
Remember how easy it was to share those pithy memes that spoke straight to your beliefs, and how easy it was to blast someone on the other side?
How easy it was to divide into self-righteousness?
On a bigger level, as they outsource to other countries.
Excerpt from the article linked above:
“The topics posted about primarily targeted the U.S., Facebook said, and although it wasn’t clearly mentioning elections or politics, the activity aligns with just the kind of division the Russians like to insert into U.S. politics. The narratives emphasized in this campaign — police brutality, oppression, injustice — are exactly those that the IRA propagated in 2016 as well.*
Managing Director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Kailee Scales, said her organization is working to stay ahead of information operations targeting the foundation’s perspective.”
*Bolded for effect.
Sound familiar?
In 3 short months we’ve moved from staying at home united behind “We’re in this together” to standing outside divided over the coverage and portrayal of BLM as we see scenes of peaceful protests juxtaposed against riots and looting.
Maybe we were indeed #saferathome…No. We weren’t.
Fast forward to Feb/Mar 2020…COVID. Misinformation to exploit both sides of the population is spread to divide us.
Don’t go outside, the choice of economy over family, vaccine v. anti-vaccine, the negative effects of quarantine v. the planet healing…all those competing narratives. All with some truth, none a whole truth.
Fast forward to May 2020. The tragedy of George Floyd.
Russian trolls love the BLM idea (read that carefully…MAKE SURE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I AM NOT NOT NOT SAYING THAT RUSSIA STARTED BLM…..NONONONONONONONO)
BLM is a domestic, grassroots, understandable, and needed response to many decades of experiences of racism.
Russia did not create that. We did, our culture did, our biases did, our arrogance on both sides did, our desire to heal did.
Russian trolls did not create BLM. They are exploiting the emotional division created by it.
Their fascination with it was documented in 2018. How have they learned to manipulate us further in the past 2 years?
Look bigger. Step back.
Drop your anger and self-righteousness for a moment. You can always pick it up again later.
Observe.
As we currently focus on BLM, and exploring the division of racial experience in the US, I ask you:
“Who wins when we are angry with each other?”
“Who wins when we get so focused on our differences that we can’t create a dialogue based on what brings us together?”
“Who wins when America, The Great Experiment, is weakened from the inside?”
When either Russia, or China, or some 3rd World wanna-be decides we’re distracted enough, ask yourself:
Will I care if the person next to me is wearing a mask?
Will I care about COVID?
Will I care about the color of the skin of the person next to me? Will I even see it, or will I see a fellow soldier?
Which lives will matter most then?
My personal answers to the above questions are what place me firmly in the All Lives Matter camp.
If the purpose of the civil rights movement was to have individuals seen as individuals, not as (insert color here) individuals, then there comes a point in time where BLM does not apply. Without the focus on color, the movement will have no need to exist.
In the space between Cognitive Bias and Cognitive Dissonance is Deadly Silence
When troll farms can play our cognitive biases and dissonance to firmly embed us in the deadly silence between them…Shouting loudly while feeling we have no voice; hearing, but not listening to, those around us because their ideas don’t match ours…we have lost.
Reflect back to the questions above about who wins.
Instead, I now ask you: Who loses?
We will fall without a shot ever being fired.
Funny how nearly every one of these 7 steps has played out in the US, and some globally, in the past few months.
We will lose our democracy.
We will lose our freedom.
We will lose what has made America, The Great Experiment, an amazing place.
For all of her flaws, for all of our past mistakes, there is so much good here.
Yes, there is a need for medication and surgery to remove and heal some tumors that have festered for far too long…
Yes, there will be a recovery time where we are collectively sore from the healing process (that’s part of the process too).
We must be careful that in our haste to address our cancers that we do not cut off our limbs so that we are unable to stand as one.
