Breaking the Loneliness

You know those creepy/comforting feelings of being seen by the internet algorithmic forces at play? Recently, I was looking at Pinterest for Bible verses presented aesthetically (I will get into why in a little bit). I had my smattering of options from Proverbs, John, and Ephesians to flip through overlayed over pastels or beautiful nature scenes. And there, among the scriptures, was Carl Sagan talking about being made of star stuff. Touché, algorithm, very on brand for my mash-up of religiosity but not something I can send to my Aunt Freida.

If you know me well then you know that while I present as a godless heathen because of the company I keep, I was raised in the church and quote scripture with the best of them. There was a time when I considered my professional options to be: 1) get an English-major and be a writer or a teacher or 2) go to seminary and be a missionary or a church leader, probably in a wifely capacity. Fortunately sometime in my early twenties an awareness of financial security came in and I abandoned ALL this options as not able to provide any such security. Instead I found myself in a (not that much more financially secure!) track to my current profession as a political strategist for progressive causes.

And those progressive causes that I have chosen generally horrified my friends and family. Which makes sense. Reproductive rights, and now immigrants rights, are issues used to consolidate a particular brand of Christian evangelical nationalist to vote as a block. And here I was, formerly voted chaplain of my senior class at my Christian school in Pensacola, Florida, defecting to the enemy. I am sure the phrase, “the devil has her in his clutches” was said, or at least thought by at least one member of my former community.

But as I have always said, I still feel like I am just answering the call to do the Lord’s work. I often wonder if we all read the same bible (for me, preferred King James, which definitely paid off when it came to Shakespeare classes while pursuing that English degree). I am not still angry at the church and teachings of my youth like many of my fellow former evangelicals (and it is fair to be mad! Especially those who had a bullseye on them for some perceived infraction of “satanism”. Remind me to tell you the story of the time some church people decided my good girl mom needed an exorcism one day when she was a teen). I just do not see them walking or preaching the walk of Christ and being around them really would make me mad. I don’t trust myself to not become angry Christ-like, flipping tables of coins on these false prophets.

And I am finding that the kind and patient approach actually holds so much more power than our culture gives it credit for. Even when anger and arguing feel more righteous.

Which leads me to the actual story I want to tell:

We all know that Facebook is where civility goes to die. Many people have felt deeply estranged from family members over the thoughtless things they post there. The promise of connection on the internet is the false promise of the false prophets of tech. As Naomi Wolf (lol jk) KLIEN writes in her book Doppelgänger, her students “almost all feel duty bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles on social media.” And what started with the youth spread to our elders as well. And suddenly some of us (especially us white southerners who liked to think our family was not a part of the more grim manifestations of racism) could see the specter of relatives enjoying a picnic in the shadow of a lynching tree from the ways they moved their digital doubles in this space.

Few choose to actually leave social media entirely - instead deploying the meager tools given to use to protect our mental health in this toxic space. We might fight and argue, but then we just mute, we block, we cut off contact with the problematic ones even when that starts to look like 95% of the family tree. Don’t worry, we tell ourselves in liberal circles, we will always have our chosen families. But what happens when members of the chosen family go from skepticism about government surveillance to repeating the plot points of the “Q-Anon” crowd. Same recipe: we argue, we mute, we block, we move on. Our circles grow smaller as we complain about how hard friendships are to build in our modern world.

And we helplessly watch the very real epidemic of loneliness growing. We get sold more apps and products to solve that loneliness epidemic. We are told to focus on healing ourself. Be satisfied being alone and then the connections will come. Kind of sounds like, be content with poverty, your riches wait in the afterlife, one of the weirder pillars in the modern church which twists this from a way to move through this world without resentment into a directive for accepting systemic inequality. (You can find happiness outside of wealth AND we can create a world of shared prosperity. They aren’t mutually exclusive.)

Anyway, I was ruminating on Naomi Klein’s book and my own struggles with loneliness and alienation in the dark ages (2020 until roughly now) when I came across a post from an aunt I hadn’t spoken to in years. We aren’t close, but I knew that my uncle had died not long before my dad did and she didn’t seem to have a lot of family close by. As a political strategist I almost never mute my more right-wing family members. It is a professional hazard to live in a messaging bubble. So occasionally I would scroll past the memes she posted, generated by the MAGA meme-o-sphere, and roll my eyes.

But as I sat in my bedroom in Miami, a little bored and lonely after yet another move to a new place, I scrolled past a picture so strange that it stopped me. This wasn’t the first one I had seen something on her feed that was a clear AI hack job. One had appropriated Keanu Reeves as a MAGA-lover. This one was Morgan Freeman holding a shirt that said “Kamala is not black, Joe has dementia and Hunter is a crook.” The message was consistent with what the leader of the MAGAs had been pushing for the last week, but the messenger being assigned here was what got me worked up.

I decided it was time for the southern woman they raised to come out. They say about a southern woman that she can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip. “Well, Aunt Frieda,” I wrote, “posting this makes it seem like you are not doing so well yourself. I hope that is not true. Y’all raised us better than to talk like this. We can disagree without being nasty, can’t we? Also, this is obviously a computer-made image because this actor is known for not being mean-spirited like this picture suggest. Maybe you were hacked?”

What have I started, I asked myself as I pressed post and put my phone down. I got ready for bed hoping I do not wake up to a Mississippian pile-on from family members I haven’t talked to in years.

In the morning, I had a notification that she had liked the message and sent me a meme on messenger about wanting to see God in the White House. I took a deep breath and wrote, “Hi Aunt Frieda! This is a much better thing to post online than that other mean message.” She liked it and then said, “Hi honey! Love you!”

This is not what I was expecting. “Love you too, Aunt Freida! Hope you are doing well!” She responded with three different memes about the Lord’s blessings, the power of prayer, and the dignity and strength of southern women.

This was about a week and a half ago now and every morning since then she and I exchange pleasant memes with one another and a wish that the other has a good day. Once we talked about how much we miss my dad and her late husband. She stills posts some political memes on her page, but none of them racist or unkind.

She was definitely lonely. She is happy to be connected to a family member even though I am unlikely candidate for it has been probably 25 years since we have seen each other. And, honestly, I am happy about this unexpected turn of events too. It feels really nice to wake up to a picture of Dolly Parton and a message about strong women or even one about watching out for the devil’s influence out there in the world. We may disagree about how the devil is showing up in the modern world, but we both miss living in a world where people saw each other more often. A world where people showed up with food when a member of the family died. A world where we didn’t walk around feeling like we are disposable, not just in the systems that govern our lives, but also in the eyes of our kids, our siblings, our friends, and our elders.

So, I will keep collecting memes that give encouragement to one of my elders. I won’t be changing her vote or her political affiliation. But I hope it softens the edge of feeling abandoned. Because it is that abandonment that gives the devil that I see most active in our world, the ones promoting fascist world views, profit over people, and making us believe there is nothing we can do to stop it, an opportunity to recruit with promises of acceptance.

I appreciate Naomi Klein not just using her skills to outline this mirror world we are living and helping give me some context to think about these things, but also infusing it with the vulnerability so many of us feel. Highly recommend her book to all those who feel we are losing our grip on reality, but are bravely deciding not to isolate into a false bubble of safety. Bravely believing that it is not too late for us.