It’s only mid-November, but it doesn't feel too soon to say this: 2020 is the year Americans were traumatized by media.
Social media and the corporate news media nearly wrecked us all, and the severe emotional distress many Americans felt in 2020 is directly connected to how those two institutions have behaved.
From deliberately alarmist nonstop coronavirus news to election coverage that should frankly strip them of Americans' credulity forever, the corporate news media proved this year they are not our friends and they do not care much for the truth. More probably, they are the insidious propaganda arm of a technocratic state always interested in controlling its citizenry.
Social media behaved even worse. Once a haven of free-speech, 2020 is when social media succumbed to the allure of censorious mind-control. Americans got fully Zucked. From expressing ideas that had been official doctrine only a few months prior but had now become anathema, to simply quoting the government’s own dubious decisions, many normal people found themselves suddenly and surreptitiously silenced on social media. And what made this so jarring and frightening was our utter inability to speak to a manager! Bots obeying rules and algorithms set by diktat from some invisible executives in some California conference room suddenly became the arbiters of allowable opinion. It was, and still is, scary.
All this is why Americans would do well to—after a downright diabolical climax in the corporate and social media's pot-stirring last week—log out, turn off the news, and look around. When we do, what we’ll find is that the most important people don’t sit in a Washington D.C. office that sounds like a toddler named it, and the most essential things to our happiness don't dwell on a server managed by a monstrous media machine containing more data about our behavior than we ever wanted to share. Rather, the consequential things are right next to us, near at hand: the people in our homes, our families, our communities.
Americans can heal from 2020's media-inflicted trauma by tuning them out, and by remembering our identity is not first and foremost as Americans. Should America cease to exist, each of us would find ourselves still fully intact (and sadly these days, having suddenly far more liberties than we had grown accustomed to). Each of us is not primarily the citizen of a nation populated by 330 million people; rather we are first members of our families, our churches, our neighborhoods, and our book clubs. Heck, we're Osage Indians or Camdenton Lakers before we're Americans.
That's not to diminish the American ideal; it's certainly a good one, but what the founding fathers were trying to craft was a government meant to protect our liberties, not to homogenize our identities. It's tempting to think of ourselves fundamentally as one people, a unified nation of enormous consequence, but we ought to resist the urge. Our homes and communities are where we matter the most: these are the places where our actions have great import. No national election was ever won by one vote, but the deeds of one person do hold the power to change the life of a neighbor. The sacrifice of a single man is a meaningless drop in a vast national ocean, but on the local level it can transform the fate of a friend—or even an enemy—rippling outward in a profound and powerful way. No president will solve America's most pressing problems; it is we in our communities who launch charitable initiatives, build economic prosperity, foster conversations of understanding, and defend our liberties.
I'm not saying we should give up on America or pretend it doesn't exist; rather, we should work to limit the federal government's scope in our lives by shoring up the walls of the institutions much nearer to us. Our homes and communities—not the national or global forums fostered by 24/7 media—are where we find freedom, identity, connection, and significance. So let us, as we approach the end of the year no one wanted, turn not to the locale we can reach with a keyboard, but that which we can reach with an extended hand. Let us in our own homes and communities create stories of hope and healing, success and legacy. Maybe if we can find a way to do that, 2020 will not have been for naught, after all.
