Lay Down Your Phones

My new thing is forcing myself to replace screen time with books, writing, and socializing. I probably should think about adding exercise to that mix as well, exercise is missing from my life and that’s not good. Part of the issue I have with my phone is my complete and total bewilderment with what is happening in this country with such minimal resistance from us, the governed. “Is it because of our phones??” I asked Meg one day over text. She and I share a similar doomsday vision of this dystopian farce of a democracy swirling outside our doors. “We’re entering Gilead” she said plainly, referring to the Handmaid’s Tale. If you’re anything like me, you are shocked, shocked I tell you, to receive your screen time report at the end of each week. If you don’t get a report, I dare you to turn that feature on. It’s gross.

As a writer who prides herself on humor and levity through shitty situations, these times prove quite difficult. Death, destruction, and the trampling of human rights in front of our faces is hard to laugh off. The apathy and acceptance make me angrier than the hourly assaults, mine included. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, I watch it all happen in real time. Sure, I share a bunch of stuff and make my opinion well-known on Facebook but what is that really doing aside from provoking eye rolls from those who prefer cute animal videos (I get it, I love Dodo videos) and an ignorance is bliss approach? For those of you delighting in what is happening right now all I have to say is….really? I mean…really? This isn’t even a laughable ‘merica right now.

My kids pull my head out of dread and doom. After all, they need stuff for school and one of them is getting ready to start his senior year. Yikes. But still, the news is on here everyday and I hear all.of.it.all.the.time. Mobilizing the National Guard against our own citizens and we’re just watching it happen? Children being starved to death in Gaza and we’re footing the bill? Whaaaaat has happened? Did we not learn anything from World War II? Soon, I will go back to teaching, Spanish of all things, and try to not say anything “too political” so as to not inflame the preexisting divisions. But human rights aren’t political, they’re just human rights. We are violating people’s human rights everyday here from preventing proper healthcare to women in certain states to deporting people from El Salvador to Uganda. If we’re not on a watchlist yet, we will be.

I talked to Thomas over the weekend about all that’s swirling in my head, it felt good to let it out because sometimes I feel like a pressure cooker holding in all of this angst and only sharing Facebook articles in the hopes that people will scroll as angrily as I do. Then I realized, that screen time report may be exactly what is wrong right now. None of us are actually doing anything. Sure we voice our opinions, scoff, wring our hands, and share a thing or two. But, what are we actually doing aside from watching the collapse of our democracy? All people should be frightened by seeing military personnel with guns on our streets. For me, it reminds me of my days in Venezuela. My friend Pablo, from Venezuela, said that he doesn’t think people realize how quickly a society can collapse. He, like many others, left Venezuela in the early 2000s when authoritarianism went from bad to worse. I think that’s why I’m so touchy these days—I don’t want to have to actively think of an exit strategy from a country that I believe in despite all its many flaws.

I don’t have any answers to what we need to do, I’m a follower not a leader. What I do think, however, is that I sure as hell need to pick up my phone way less. After all, I have to believe that the puppeteers behind the algorithms on social media are playing us as fools right now and that the content I get is wildly different than that of my neighbor and my neighbor’s neighbor. Much of our worldview is shaped by content coming from a tiny computer we hold in our hand for approximately one whole day each week (add your hours up, you lose about 52 days a year to your phone if not more). I have to admit I have a problem with my phone. Maybe, if we could all admit to that, we’d start to wake up from this coma. Then we organize. Then we get back on the good side of human rights. Until then, until we lay down our phones, we’re screwed.