https://twitter.com/QueenInYeIIow/status/1219081537976709121 (Tweeted by @QueenInYellow 8:17 PM, Jan 19, 2020)
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1219015376530485249 (Tweeted 3:54 PM, Jan 19, 2020, Retweeted by @QueenInYellow about 5-6 hours later)
One day, sometime in the last half-decade or so, I woke up and the world was binary. Let me clarify. I did not, as characters of varied science fictions do, open my eyes and see strings of 0s and 1s. Rather, each object in my room had a value associated with it: “good” or “bad.” It wasn’t an instinct or even really a word assigned to it, but rather, I just knew that everything in my room was either good or bad. I had been out late the night before, so my reflection was bad. The picture with my parents, perched on the edge of my dresser, was good. The weekend before, I had finally pulled the trigger and bought the dark green comforter I’d had my eye on for a while, but up until today, I’d been unsure whether it went with the color of my room and my bed. But now I was sure. It didn’t. It was bad.
Life is easier when you’re sure of things. Actually, scratch that. “Sure” is the wrong word. “Sure” implies that the people around me could have other opinions. As I mentioned above, it wasn’t like that; I knew what was good and what was bad.
People have asked me what it was like to lose friends because of this change. I tell them that I didn’t. From the moment I heard Jeff say that “we might not get Medicare-for-all on day one, even in a Sanders presidency,” I knew that he was no longer my friend. Six days later, I was talking to my mom on the phone when she said “it’s sad, but I just feel like Biden might be the only one who can beat Trump,” and I haven’t spoken to her since. I’d say that I feel good about my decisions, but no part of that sentence would be true. I don’t feel good; I know that my actions were good. I made no decision to leave these people behind; rather, it was the only action I could take.
Since that day, I have, however, gained a community. It turns out there are millions of us who know absolute good from absolute bad. Additionally, I have learned that there are tens of millions of others who believe they know good from bad. Unfortunately for them, I know that every single one of their opinions is wrong and bad.
My daily routine consists of two things. First I go to work, where I do public relations and social media strategy for ExxonMobil. When I get home, I go straight to Twitter so I can make sure other people know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m providing a service, educating people who don’t know better that their opinions are wrong and that that makes them bad people.
Unfortunately for them, once they’re wrong once, they’re wrong forever. I honestly do not know when politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, actors and activists like Bradley Whitford and Alyssa Milano, or reporters like Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow first became bad, but I do know that I have never seen them say anything good.
I guess that’s just the way it is now.
Working Notes
The two tweets linked above seemingly contradict each other, one criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren for not creating conflict with former Vice President Joe Biden, and one making fun of her for criticizing him. The only commonalities are that they were tweeted/retweeted by the same account, less than a couple hours apart, and that they are both critical of Senator Warren. I decided to attempt to tell the story of how a person gets to the point of critiquing opposite stances by the same person. By caricaturing the idea that someone knows pure right from pure wrong, I attempted to create the logical leaps that would lead to this cognitive dissonance. By ending with “I guess that’s just the way it is now,” I connect this phenomenon from the individual person to the societal level.