It’s a website called NextDoor and was begun in 2008 to connect people in their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Kind of like Facebook for Main Street. Time once was you could visit NextDoor and see items and news that make a community, a community. Posts about the Scouts, Little League games and the bake sale at church. You could ask for contractor recommendations and promote your non-profit. Some folks posted pictures of cute critters that make nocturnal visits to their backyards.
NextDoor was about as local and relatively innocuous as it could get and yet….
The challenge on NextDoor was and is how to temper discussions that get out of hand, neighborhood squabbles that dissolve into very public spats. Volunteer moderators once did this well. Now?
Last week I went on NextDoor to look around, see what’s going on in my little town, when I viewed a link for a YouTube video designed to anger people. To troll folks. To raise the communal temperature. To tweak the sensibilities, in this case, of “the libs” as some folks like to say with derision. It was a video about crime in Boston, and the unspoken but apparent need for the President to send in National Guard troops, like in Chicago and D.C.
And then the toxic tennis match began.
Folks posted about the danger of ANTIFA, and others posted that fascism wasn’t on the streets of Boston, it was in the White House. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. My neighbors, sitting with their laptops or phones, viciously tearing one another down, toxic language and behavior on display.
And not just on NextDoor.
It’s toxic at School Committee as folks line up for the public discussion so they can get someone fired because of a Facebook post. This while cops stand by just in case. Toxic at some churches as folks literally take their side of the pews, left or right, and if the pastor is too lefty or righty, well, let’s just fire them! Toxic at work. “Please don’t bring up politics!” Toxic at home. I know two couples whose marriages ended because one loved the President, and the other could not stand him.
Makes me wonder…do we even know what civility looks and feels like anymore? Can we agree to disagree without being disagreeable? Can we engage with the other and just listen and not immediately point a digital middle finger at anyone who posts something we don’t like? Can we have an open enough mind that it might actually be changed?
Or are we now addicted to swimming in the toxic sea that is drowning our culture? Toxicity has now become “normal.”
This has largely come about because of the example set by political leaders in the highest of offices and yes, the highest office of all. When you call all immigrants rapists, talk about grabbing women by the ______; when you refer to African countries as ____holes and brag about how much you hate your opponents while speaking at a funeral, the vitriol and violent rhetoric flows out and flows down, infects everyone.
Toxic language and actions give folks permission to treat others terribly. To insult. To deride. To threaten. To yell at. To rage. To live in a constant state of agitated righteousness. Don’t they ever get tired of living such grievance-based lives?
Do all of these folks who post and protest and attack and consume news 24/7,on the right and the left: do they have anything else going on in life? You know…bowling league or potluck supper at the temple or maybe just a pastime that brings them joy? Baking cookies. Walking the dog. For the sake of the millions who are now so disgruntled…will they ever find peace?
I hope so.
My faith tells me that toxicity and wanting to see others suffer, especially an opponent: it’s just plain wrong. It’s an insult to the God of love, who is so full of grace that we all get to be forgiven when we are at our worst. I know I need God’s mercy every day. I don’t have all the answers. My “side” is not 100 percent right, not even close, nor is the faith I practice. And I don’t want to see the one I disagree with get hurt or humiliated or exiled or deported.
Toxicity practiced always leads to toxicity experienced within, and that is a really, really sad way to live. The life God gives us can be hard but also so beautiful. But to know this we have to raise our eyes up from the mud and dare to look at the stars in the heavens.
I’m done with toxicity, next door and everywhere else. How about you?
(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)
The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment