I Hope It Breaks My Heart

In October, the flames of Northern California Fire Season danced around the edges of my neighborhood and Ron and I remained on evacuation warning for five days with our electricity turned off by PG&E. During that time, many people contacted us by text and email to see if we were safe. We didn’t get the emails until the power came back on because we had no internet service. I soon found myself trying to formulate my thoughts and feelings into words to describe how I met the moment.

When we received the evacuation warning, we loaded our cars with many of our most precious possessions, prepared to leave. Having done this exercise when placed on evacuation warning for a day the year before, I was able to pack up and load my car in under an hour. I keep a thoughtfully compiled list of what to take so I don’t forget anything in my haste. I walked through the house and said my goodbyes as best as possible to the many things we would leave behind that would burn up if it came to that. In the end, it's just "stuff," isn’t it? Stuff I like, but just stuff. My home is wherever Ron is. I can love him in any bed. We laughed at ourselves because once we had the cars loaded, we had no idea where we would go. The highways were closed in most directions and a large swathe of the county was on evacuation warning with the power shut off. We could have driven North to look for a hotel, I suppose, but I would first have to find a small-animal emergency shelter because I would not get far listening to the yowling of two elderly cats who seem to think that a pleasant ride in the car is a form of torture from one of the circles of hell. Fortunately, we never had to evacuate.

Those five days with no power were actually quite lovely. At night I could see many more stars without the city lights to dim them. We usually see plenty of stars in this rural area, but it was even more dramatic with the lights of the town snuffed. Usually people don’t come out in the street to interact with one another much in our neighborhood, so it was a treat to have neighbors hang out in the street together chatting, joking, and sharing the news updates. With no internet, I took a break from the chaos and horror of current events. I did some writing using my laptop’s battery backup. I cut fabric for a quilting project, to sew later when the power came back on. We turned on our backup generator for a few hours every day to warm the house, recharge the phones and laptops, and take hot showers (we have an on-demand electric hot water heater). I went for walks. We did word puzzles together and played cards. We read by candlelight in bed and, well, one thing led to another because, after all, we were in bed together. Old people look younger by candlelight. (I wonder if there will be a baby boomlet in NorCal nine months from the power outage.) The house was silent without the background buzz of electrical current and humming appliances that we generally tune out but never free ourselves from. It was a peaceful five days.

I suppose the eventual collapse of systems due to the climate emergency will take us back to a simpler and more basic way of life. It will be a more dangerous way of life and will require far more physical labor. Perhaps that will be a good thing. Good for some, not so good for others. Good for those healthy, fit, skilled, and resourceful. The permanent loss of electricity and failure of established systems would kill my husband, who is vulnerable because of his compromised health. He can’t maintain his body temperature in the cold weather and he’s an insulin-dependent Type I. So I can’t truly wish for systems to begin breaking down, although I confess that a part of me would welcome that. I have even had my moments in which I felt relief at the possibility of having all our stuff burn up. Just as wildfire cleans out the forest, it cleans out the accumulation of people’s stuff, taking us back to fundamentals. At this stage of my life, I’m moving toward unloading my possessions, a lifetime collection of beautiful things, so that I don’t have so much to maintain and also so my children don’t have so much to wade through when I’m gone. It’s challenging to do this in an ecologically sound manner while tempted to just cart it off to the landfill.

I often recall that my people walked away from dire situations in countries persecuting Jews with not much more than the Sabbath candlesticks. They didn’t just start over with no possessions, they often started over with no money, no resources, no knowledge of the language, and no viable profession. In a wildfire two years ago that destroyed his house, a friend of mine lost the tefillin (a ritual Jewish prayer object) brought to America by his grandfather fleeing Eastern Europe. The tefillin was one of the only things brought out from complete loss by my friend’s grandfather. It was not only an instrument of prayer, but a beloved object of everyday use for the man who brought it over from the old country. Irreplaceable. I found myself putting simple objects of everyday use into my car, such as a quilt I made and my well-seasoned, ancient, cast-iron, deep-dish frying pan (which I then had to fish back out of the car that evening to cook dinner).

In some ways, I have been preparing emotionally for the climate emergency ever since I was a child. I was aware of many of the dangers and issues long before most people had any inkling. My mother told me that when I was ten years old (I don’t remember this), I went door-to-door in our neighborhood in upstate New York to warn the neighbors that acid rain would fall over the Great Lakes if we didn’t stop polluting the air with gases such as carbon dioxide. The year was 1964. I have rehearsed for environmental collapse in my head my whole life. I wrote a sci-fi novel about it that I can’t get published. One literary agent told me she found the book too depressing. Seriously? I suppose it’s easier to pretend this isn’t happening. My point is that I have been hyper-aware about climate degradation for a long time. Once a week the trucks come through my neighborhood to collect my trash, recycling, and compost bins left at the street for pickup. One of my greatest pleasures is lying in bed in the early morning on waste collection day and listening to the garbage trucks clatter through. It comforts me to hear evidence that the systems are still working. I give thanks for the garbage pickup every week. I have done this for decades, in several different houses. Bill Watterson (creator of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon) says:  “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

I read a recent article in the New York Times about coping with “climate grief.” Those of us cognizant of the climate emergency must struggle with the weight of what we have lost and what we stand to lose as our planet tumbles toward the inability to sustain human life and the lives of a vast number of exquisite non-human species as well. But life has always been about loss, hasn’t it? That’s why we cherish it so. When I realized that my loss of hearing in the high ranges had finally robbed me of the ability to hear birdsong, I had to accept the loss and move on. And that was such a small thing compared to, say, the death of a person I have loved. The death of a person, while no small thing ever (in Senegal they say, “when an old person dies, a library burns down”), is a small thing compared to, say, the drowning of all the islands of the Maldives. Or the disappearance of the coral reefs, the loss of the rainforests, the death of a species. All whales. All orange trees. All elephants. All algae.

I still have faith that personal action makes a difference, however small, so I take many actions to show the love for Earth, to preserve the climate. For instance, I drive an electric car. I try to appreciate and cherish the treasures in my daily life:  a delicious bowl of soup, spectacular oak tree, splendid sunset, evening of conversation with friends, reading to my grandson, tending my garden, laughing and cooking with my children, kissing my husband. I count my blessings often. I also have faith in the younger generations coming up. I believe that the young ones will rise to the challenge of figuring out solutions. They will create, invent, innovate, transform. They will accept our losses and move forward into the unknown, making it up as they go. They are resilient and brilliant. They will shine. Today looks vastly different from 1920, which looks vastly different from 1820. Who would have imagined? I refuse to believe that human endeavor ends with us. I have faith that an unimaginably different 2120 landscape will come into view, and I have faith that it will contain at least a few righteous humans who have not burned up, starved, drowned, or become illiterate.

Life is ever precarious, balancing on a razor’s edge. Seeing what I saw about the coming climate chaos at a remarkably tender young age, I have lived my life with passion and gratitude. Now, selfishly, I pray that in spite of the danger, violence, and destruction that engulfs the world, my own blessed life continues to be so full of joy, bringing me continued gifts and wonders, that it breaks my heart to leave it in the end.

Counted as a Member of Jewish Community

An encounter at synagogue a few weeks ago during the Yom Kippur evening service called Kol Nidre gave me pause. That evening, about halfway through the service, a strange man entered the synagogue and took a seat at the back. There was nothing about him to cause alarm; however, I belong to a small and intimate rural congregation where I know everyone and I didn’t know him. He came in late in the service and did not wear a prayer shawl or yarmulke. A couple of years ago, I surely would not have taken any notice. However now, in the current climate of hatred and blatant anti-Semitism, my thoughts went a different way.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that hate crimes against Jews more than doubled in 2018 from the previous year. Hate crimes in California increased by 21%. Here, in California, Nazi graffiti is not categorized as a hate crime. So spraying a swastika on a synagogue is not a hate crime, just vandalism. I find this appalling. FBI data shows that Jewish people and institutions are the most frequently targeted religious group for hate crimes nationwide, accounting for 58% of religious-based hate-crime incidents. Muslims are the second most frequent target, at 18.6%. (Source:  CBS News, 2018.) Anti-Semitic incidents constitute half of all hate crimes in New York City. In 2018, there were four times as many hate crimes against Jews in New York City than against African Americans (New York Times, 2018), even though Jews make up 13% of the population of New York and blacks make up 24%. Black Lives Matter, and my people also can’t breathe. I do not cite these statistics to compare suffering but rather to point out that while anti-Semitism is widespread it often remains invisible in public spaces where discourse on racism occurs.

As a product of history, with family who died in the Holocaust, and living in this historical time of continued oppression, unleashed with greater fury under this government, I looked at the stranger in my midst that Kol Nidre evening and instead of feeling a wave of welcome, I felt a wave of terror. I imagined him drawing a gun and firing on my community. I looked around at the familiar faces of those I have known these many years, those for whom I have great affection and affinity, and imagined bullet-ridden bleeding bodies. My heart thrashed loudly in my throat. I considered where to run, where to hide, and whether I should drop to the floor and act dead. What was I thinking? I was thinking that I and my community are in danger. We are vulnerable, hunted, viewed by many as the source of all evil, just as much now as we were hundreds of years ago during deeply ignorant times. We continue to live in ignorant times. The myth of blood libel is alive and well.

Embraced in the sacred space of prayer, I calmed my mind and slowed my madly beating heart. I convinced myself that the stranger was simply a fellow Jew, away from home on a holiday, who had found a local synagogue and come for Kol Nidre. That was more plausible. That was the truth. The next morning, during Yom Kippur services, the rabbi invited congregants up for an aliyah. This is the honor of reading from the Torah or standing at the altar while it is open. For this particular aliyah, she invited anyone who wished to stand up and be counted as a member of a community. I went. I wanted to stand before the open Torah to be counted as a member of my Jewish community. As I stood, it occurred to me that standing up as a Jew is an act of defiance. It is an act of courage, and always has been. I take a risk openly and proudly declaring myself a Jew. My ancestors took this risk. Some of them died for it. I hope I don’t.

As I stood at the open Torah, I also had another thought. This one brought me great joy and great comfort. It was the opposite of my fear of the stranger the previous evening. I reflected on the beautiful way that a Jew can enter a synagogue anywhere in the world and be welcomed, as I should have welcomed the strange man at Kol Nidre, and would have if I hadn’t let my imagination run wild. When my father was presenting at a math conference in Berlin a few years ago, and it was the weekend of my grandfather’s yahrzeit (anniversary of his death), he found a synagogue near his hotel and walked over there for Sabbath services so he could say Kaddish for his father. The moment he came through the door, congregants warmly welcomed him. The rabbi gave him an aliyah. In 1983, my parents moved to Tennessee from the town in upstate New York where they had lived for more than 30 years and raised me and my brothers. My father had taken a teaching position at the University of TN in Knoxville. They joined a synagogue immediately. After only a few short weeks in Knoxville, my mother was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. I was expecting a baby soon, and could not go to her. The Jewish community (that my parents had only just joined) mobilized. They took terrific care of my parents through the ordeal, which my mother survived. One woman in particular ensured that my parents were looked after, with meals brought to the house and people checking in to help out. This woman became a dear and continuing friend to my mother in all the years that followed. A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world.

Last year I met a young man, a stranger among us, at our synagogue. He came to Sabbath services one evening with his girlfriend, who is not Jewish. He is a Sephardic Jew from Paris. He had met his girlfriend in Taiwan when they were both enrolled in a summer language intensive to learn Mandarin. The girlfriend is now in her senior year at the City of 10,000 Buddhas Dharma Realm College. I befriended these two remarkable young people, and my husband and I have enjoyed many an evening of dinner and conversation in their company. In the spring, they landed in a problem situation with housing and so we took them in to stay at our house for a little while. Soon after, the young man was forced to return to France. But they remain very much together as a couple, and she has been to see him in Paris, and will go again soon. His girlfriend told me recently that when he told her he was going to call me when they had their difficulty with housing, she asked if that would be OK and he replied, “of course, we’re fellow Jews, I know she’ll offer to help.” Of course. This young man and his parents will travel here in May for her graduation, and we have offered to host a party for her at our house. Last week I had an email from him in which he said that he has told his parents all about me and my husband, and that his mother wants to meet “the Jewish mother who took such good care of another Jewish mother’s Jewish son.” A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world.

On the one hand, I have a greater fear of the stranger than in times past, and on the other hand, I retain my affinity with my fellow Jews whether I know them personally or not. For that matter, I retain my desire to welcome the stranger, any stranger (Jewish or not) in my midst. Therefore I vow to work harder to conquer my fear so that I can continue to openly welcome the stranger. I must resist, and not allow the oppressor to change my heart. A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world. My people. I wish to stand up and be counted as a member of the Jewish community. Defiant. Courageous. Fearless. Not easy. I am blessed to have been born a Jew.

Season for Change

It has taken me a long time to reconcile myself with the fact that I did not become the great and famous writer I had planned to become when in my youth. In recent weeks, after swearing off social media, I find that I do not have the means by which to even vaguely deceive myself into thinking that my thoughts or words are of much consequence. Leaving social media has had a greater impact on my life than I had imagined it would. The psychology of the thing is insidiously misleading. Social media enables people to embrace the false perception that they are doing something in the world and that they are significant, when in fact they are not. Posting a link to a petition on Facebook is not the same as going to a demonstration to add to the numbers, writing postcards to congressional representatives, raising one’s voice, trading in a gas-guzzling car for an electric vehicle, eating vegan, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, or crossing the ocean in a solar racing yacht to demand that world leaders answer for the sin of failing to act to save the planet for future generations. It is not the same as actually doing something. It is nothing. I knew that. Now I feel it deep down. Social media gives people the false idea that the things they say on it have some kind of weight in the world.

It’s no crime to want to make a difference in the world. I think everyone yearns for that in ways great and small. We all want to leave a mark to show that we passed this way. We want to be remembered, to matter. But the hard truth is that precious few of us are all that significant. When I die, I will be mourned and remembered by my circle of friends and family, and not beyond. Then life will go on. I have never made the high level of sacrifice or risked all for the grand gesture necessary to have a largescale impact. I have not earned it. Posting my thoughts on Facebook does not make me immortal. In fact, when systems collapse, the internet will disappear. None of the trails we have left in cyberspace will remain. I understand the impulse. People fear obscurity. We fear the forgetting of it. The forgetting of ourselves. Disappearance. We fear the finality of death. This is what philosophers often refer to as “the human condition.” It is the poignant truth of our human lives; the grief we feel at every loss of life. Fortunately, we have joy to balance it out. If not for the joy, and the loss of it, then death would not bother us so much. Joy does not reside in a handheld device, however. It’s outside the window, beyond the borders of the screen, in the green, breathing, scented, sensual world.

Having recently crossed the threshold of 65 years on miraculous Earth, I have come to a place where I am at peace with how small I am. I only regret that it seems to be paralyzing me from determinedly pursuing publication of the many words I have already written from back when I still clung to the dream of being heard. I do wish I could publish my unpublished books and that my words might matter to others and ease, enlighten, and delight them on their journey. As it stands, my words have mostly only eased my own journey. I have hoped to use my gift as a wordsmith to benefit other travelers on the planet. I gather from what people have told me that a few of my words have done so from time to time, which is truly a fine thing and lifts my heart.

At this time, though, I find myself in the midst of a season of change. The changes are various and the details of them too close to the bone to share yet. I am trying to step into these changes gracefully, wisely, and bravely. A time of change is cause for sorrow over what is lost, but it is also cause for the glad excitement of new beginnings. How many times have I gone dashing headlong into the unknown to make a change in my life? I have always had a healthy sense of adventure and a willingness to shake things up, to take a chance. This attribute has usually served me well. My greatest leaps of faith have yielded great rewards. Honestly, at a fundamental level, getting married, having children, switching professions, or moving to a new community all require huge leaps of faith, which ordinary people like myself navigate all the time. So perhaps I am not that unusual in terms of taking chances, such as falling in love with a man from a culture dramatically different from my own or shooting the moon and moving from Berkeley to a 40-acre forest in a rural community to raise my children. Those who know me well can come to their own conclusions based on the trajectory of my life. Nowadays people like to broadcast the details of their life transitions on social media, as if that gives them greater import. It does not. But neither does it diminish the courage it takes to make those changes in the real world. Because there are no guarantees.

For the first time, I feel the shadow of old age approaching, with all that goes along with that. As a result, I believe that the time has come to make certain changes to my lifestyle, my thinking, my expectations, my priorities. What better time to contemplate such moves than this week, at the Jewish High Holidays? Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One of the three pillars of the Jewish High Holidays is teshuvah, translated as “turning” or “changing.” In the context of the holidays, it refers to recognizing wrong actions and wrong directions in our lives and making a commitment to change, redirect. It is not enough to recognize our transgressions and atone for them. We are also charged with making a commitment to prevent them from happening again. This requires making changes in ourselves and our way of acting in the world. It requires personal growth, and thus teshuvah also refers to the overall process of transformation. More than a mere New Year’s resolution, it is a tectonic shift in being and a start in taking the small steps required to change, one after the other, one foot and then the next. It is a time for starting out on a path that leads to a new place. I have turned these thoughts over in my mind the way I might turn a precious stone over in my hands, and I have begun to embrace coming changes in my life. Some of these changes are a choice I make while others will happen whether I wish them to or not.

I lift a glass to courage as I contemplate the daring future. I am ever grateful to have my husband at my side, steady as always, and the blessing of my children and grandson to remind me of how fortunate I have been in my life so far. May my luck hold. May I make good decisions. May tragedy pass over, leaving my house untouched. I wish for a long life so full of joy that it breaks my heart to leave it in the end. And I wish all this for you too, friend, fellow traveler, whoever you are who continues to read my words. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good and sweet year.

Getting Lost Is No Fun

When did it become fashionable to demonize GPS devices and navigation assistance? I have recently seen articles equating the use of GPS with burying one’s face in a smart phone 24/7 instead of connecting with in-the-flesh people, with living a virtual life playing electronic games all day while the actual sun is sparkling on the actual river, or with practicing Satanic rituals in the basement. I have read that GPS does everything from shrinking brain function, to impairing perception of the three-dimensional realm, to aggravating insomnia, to undermining the upkeep of street signs, to causing dementia, to resulting in an obsession with cheese. Even one of my most beloved writers, Rebecca Solnit, believes that GPS has a detrimental impact on our perception of the physical world. She writes that “getting lost and then finding your way out of the terra incognita” is a valuable experience. Sorry, Rebecca, I disagree. Getting lost is no fun. I have struggled all my life with having no sense of direction, and I can attest to the fact that it is a disability and GPS is assistive technology that has greatly improved my life. Without GPS, I would still be wandering around in the basement trying to escape Satan.

I have gotten lost in the women’s restroom in Macy’s and had to be escorted to the proper exit door (by a six-year-old who saw me open the door to the mop closet). I have entered maze-like apartment complexes and had to be extricated by Search and Rescue. I have gotten my car stuck in the mud in the woods in the middle of the night while driving down a creek bed, all-the-while thinking I was on Highway 101 (why aren’t there any other cars on this road?). I have set out to attend a company meeting at a retreat site in the Castro Valley and wound up at a shopping mall in Stockton. I have spent hours driving in circles, hours trying to find the right path back out of a forest, hours trying to assemble a combination of landmarks into some organized pattern. I have arrived late for special events, or sometimes not at all. I have tried my hardest to translate the lines on a map to an understanding of the real web of roads in front of my car. I can’t process “turn South.” Does that mean right or left? I left my sundial in the mop closet. Solnit may romanticize “attentive wandering” (as she calls it) all she likes, but when she finishes with that she can find her way home. I, on the other hand, have to attentive wander my ass into a motel for the night only to resume hunting for the trail of crumbs back to my house in the morning.

I was so incapable of “following my nose” that if we got a bit turned around while traveling, my husband would ask me which way I thought we should go so he could then go in the diametrical opposite direction of what seemed right to me because he could count on my sense of direction to be the complete opposite of the right way, literally 180 degrees off. He could depend on my internal compass to be that consistently busted. I had supremely dysfunctional magnetic energy.

Enter the advent of Mapquest. When it first arrived on the scene, I swooned. I fell in love. Mapquest was my co-pilot. I slept with Mapquest printouts under my pillow. When I had to go somewhere unfamiliar, I would run out a Mapquest with specific directions about where and when to turn and whether right or left. As long as I did not stray from the Mapquest, I could suddenly find my way anywhere. It was like riding a magic carpet. Mapquest was the truth and the truth set me free. Solnit writes: “When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings.” That’s simply not how it works for someone with no sense of direction. I wanted Mapquest to tell me which way to turn. I pay such close attention to my surroundings that every street looks like the one I should turn on. Before Mapquest, when I made a decision about my route, I would panic the minute I followed it. What if I had headed the wrong way? It was as if someone told me to turn at the Starbuck’s; seriously, which one?

I was still marveling over Mapquest when my husband bought me a Tom-Tom. It was the quintessential device for the directionally impaired. I fell in love all over again. With my Tom-Tom, I could find my way even if I went completely off-course. Once I set it to my destination, then it would take me there from anywhere. I could find my way from my house to the Taj Mahal if necessary. Suddenly, the world was my oyster, as they say. Meanwhile, out on an unmarked trail in the Sierras, the anti-GPS movement was gaining traction. Neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot declared her research indicates that “when we get lost, it activates the hippocampus, it gets us completely out of the habit mode.” She claims that getting lost is a good thing and that by finding our way without the use of a GPS requires us to use spatial-memory strategies that increase the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus. Stimulating the hippocampus in this way prevents cognitive impairment and dementia. For me, finding my way without GPS, the best case scenario would be that I would make lots of gray matter and therefore remember what my house looks like (no dementia) but I would have no idea how to get there (directional impairment). I would basically retain the cognitive ability to understand that I needed to attentively wander my ass into a motel for the night yet again. But wow, look how much gray matter I made! 

Neuroscientists report that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions. They consider this a negative thing, and warn that we lose some aspect of brain function when we don’t use our built-in spatial-memory and navigation strategies. But what about someone who was born without a built-in navigation system? What about someone wired to perceive a road sign as a trick question. Honestly, I am not the only directionally impaired person on the planet. I’m not even the only one in my family. It’s a genetic trait. My first cousin, my nephew, and my daughter share it with me, and all of us are eternally grateful for GPS. I assure you that we are painfully aware of our surroundings. We simply don’t recognize them. People use their cell phones nowadays to navigate, while I continue my love affair with my Tom-Tom, which works fine for me. I don’t want a Smart Phone, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I don’t want the government to know where I am every second of every minute of every day.

In the past couple of years, however, I have noticed some interesting transformations happening with my ability to find my way. A few years ago, I started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and learning this visual language is changing my brain. I have evolved a distinctly improved sense of direction. Crazy, huh? I’m not perfect, but I’m better than I used to be for sure. (Oliver Sacks wrote about how learning a visual language reprograms the brain in his book Seeing Voices.) Using a visual language has awakened a dormant spatial realm of cognition in my brain. To my shock and delight, I find myself more often knowing exactly which way to turn. Communicating visually has helped me find where I am in the universe. Before I started learning ASL, it didn’t matter how many times I went to a place, I was still liable to totally forget how to find it. Now I tend to better remember what turns I took, the landmarks, how far everything is from everything else. (Hey, I’ve been here before!) Even so, I completely identify with others who have no sense of direction. Unless you have experienced this, you really have no idea how life-changing GPS can be. Go ahead and turn yours off and commune with the world you wander into, but I’m keeping my GPS turned on and arriving at my destination, thank you very much.

Solnit (whom I admire and usually agree with) can rhapsodize about how wandering lost leads us to “knowing places, which is one of the most rewarding things there is” and that “being oriented is a geographical-spiritual necessity for some of us.” She can encourage everyone to turn off their GPS and follow their nose, but she lives in a parallel universe to those of us who lack the ability to conjure spatial-memory strategies or geographically correct mindsets that allow us to figure out how to get from A to B. For us, being oriented is not a spiritual necessity but a practical challenge to overcome. Please help me out of the mop closet and point me toward the exit.

We must recognize that each one of us lives inside our own reality, which we create from the tools given to us, which include our individual brain functioning. Our individual perception defines our world. So let’s be careful about making generalizations about what is good or bad for people’s brains. My brain needs GPS. So don’t tell me that I’m not living my best life because I use GPS. I would rather find my way with GPS than get lost and engage with the world that turns up in front of me when I have no idea where I am or how to get where I need to go. That’s a horrible feeling. GPS helps me live my best life. It prevents me from spending so much of it in “attentive wanderment,” which does not sound like a productive activity to me. For me, getting lost is no fun.

Dark Psychic Forces of Social Media

Give me the strength to resist the pull of dark psychic forces attempting to suck me under using the deadly whirlpool of Facebook. I feel like Dorothy spinning in the tornado. Will my house land on a wicked witch? If so, can I have her striped socks? I did not realize how addicted to Facebook I had become until I stopped using it. I originally created an account to promote my books and my blog. That disappeared in the rearview long ago. Over time, I have become increasingly seduced by the Facebook experience. The platform was first created as a resource for connectivity, which is my favorite thing about it. If only it could have stopped at that and not devolved into the nefarious mechanism for global destruction it has become. You may wonder what changed for me. What changed is that I watched the exposé The Great Hack (available for streaming on Netflix), which is quite the eye-opener. It is a testimony to the power of art to change our lives that this documentary made a measureable difference in mine. It is also a testimony to the power of social-media-driven manipulative advertising that authoritarian, repressive, unethical, climate-emergency-denying governments are on the rise around the world.

Facebook have I loved. I loved that it made me laugh. I loved that it lifted me up with beautiful images. I loved that it gave me a window into the lives of others. I loved the things I learned (while carefully navigating false information). I loved that it kept me in communication with friends around the world whom I would otherwise rarely connect with, certainly not on a daily basis. Many friends I will never see again in person in this life, but we continued to touch each other’s lives in virtual space. I felt empowered to share my political views and censor what I wished to read by hitting the delete button. I instigated a few political actions with my words. I felt heartened to discover like-minded souls. I enjoyed more than a few extraordinary Facebook connectivity experiences. But I was ignoring the seamy underside. All this time, Facebook has been collecting personal data on people, mine included, and selling it in the open marketplace where it can be and is used without our consent for unethical purposes. All my Facebook loves do not outweigh the abuse of data made possible by this platform, which has caused the actual (not virtual) loss, pain, and death of people resulting from the amoral calculated manipulation of targeted advertising. Or the misuse of data that has resulted in power shifts away from recognizing and addressing the climate emergency now upon us because it interferes with the profits of a few unconcerned individuals. I’m taking the children, the cats, the books, my EV, and my cast iron skillet, and I’m divorcing Facebook.

I confess that at first I found The Great Hack somewhat confusing. I couldn’t understand what was going on or why key players made the choices they did. I couldn’t connect the dots and figure out how access to people’s data made it possible to throw an election. Until I had my aha moment. It was all about the advertising. Duh. It was about targeted manipulation. I was partly confused because I had never seen the advertising Cambridge Analytica used to influence people that was shown in the film and I didn’t even get what some of it was meant to do. I have never seen any of that advertising. I never saw it because I am not what Cambridge Analytica categorizes as a “persuadable.” I was probably not targeted because I was profiled as someone unlikely to be swayed by advertising. But others are. Others are prey. And the predators went for blood. It was Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” (can you believe his book was published in 1957?) on steroids and powered by the technology of the 21^st century as a tool of the dark psychic forces, a weapon of mass destruction.

Cambridge Analytica is what happens when children are raised to be smart but not raised to be ethical. These individuals don’t even understand why they should try to be good, or why goodness matters. Plainly stated, they cannot distinguish right from wrong. So Alexander Nix and his team (including Brittany Kaiser) did the immoral, disastrous things that they did just to see if they could actually succeed at them. The extreme consequences for individual, real, breathing, living people did not enter into it. The Cambridge Analytica interference in the election in Trinidad, where they ran a targeted advertising campaign to convince young people not to vote, is a case in point. Only someone with no morals would take pride in convincing young people to self-disenfranchise. The election in Trinidad was so close, that keeping that one segment (specifically black youth) from the polls made a difference. A calculated effort to impact the election through manipulation of a vulnerable population worked. Cambridge Analytica busts open the champagne while Trinidad goes down in flames and takes the future of a whole Trinidadian generation with it. Interference in the Brexit referendum did the same for the younger generation in Britain. The devastating 2016 election in the U.S. came down to 77,744 votes in PA, WI, and MI. That’s a tiny number of “persuadables,” and well within the realm of impact of Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising to paint Hillary as “crooked” to enough people who would believe. (Cambridge Analytica invented “lock her up.”) I would bet that the smart-but-unethical wonks at Cambridge Analytica viewed the whole maneuver as if they were playing a video game. It was Ender’s Game. They considered it a virtual exercise, only to see it manifested in the real world. Their interference in the 2016 election has thrown my country down in flames. Quite literally for me, because I live in California at ground zero for the climate emergency, at ground zero for wildfires.

Before watching The Great Hack, I wondered why people would vote for candidates and initiatives that would clearly bring them to grief. Why vote for a candidate who did not have your best interests at heart? It never made sense to me. How could these people be so stupid? Don’t they understand why they can’t afford the medication they need? Why they lost their house? Why they can’t afford to send their children to college? Why their food is poisoned, their planet deteriorating, the future for their grandchildren robbed? Why would a hard-working, regular Joe support a tax law that reduces taxes for a few super-rich people and does nothing to ease his struggle? Why would he oppose legislation to provide him and his family with affordable healthcare? This used to befuddle me. But now I see. Targeted advertising has done its job and convinced people to believe the message tailored to them, specifically, to trap them in false thinking. They’re not stupid. They’re just human and they’re being conscientiously misled by those who would profit. They’re being duped. And that can happen to anyone targeted with the right kind of messaging. It could happen to me. It probably has.

I would like to believe that I have used Facebook responsibly. I think I have used it for what it was intended, which is connectivity. I would like to pretend that I have protected myself from advertising and the misuse of my personal information by remaining vigilant about patrolling my borders, blocking the unwanted, checking the right privacy boxes. But I probably have not protected myself, or those with whom I am in contact on Facebook. I have no idea what “data points” are circulating in cyberspace about me or how they are being used to hurt me or influence me or others. It’s too late to recall them. It’s too late for a lot of things. But one thing I can do is choose not to engage with Facebook. I can choose not to participate. I am not suggesting that you do the same, and I do not judge. I’m just stating what I’m doing.

I am leaving my account open for now, for the same purpose that I originally created it, which is to share my writing and direct people to my blog (and because I have no other way to contact many people with whom I want to stay in touch). So I am not ready to close my account, but perhaps I will eventually, even though it will not help me recall the data points on myself that have already escaped. I am still sorting out what I think about all this and how I want to act on what I know. But these thoughts are mine, they do not originate in an algorithm run on me used to influence my choices. I will resist the whispers of the hidden persuaders lurking in the dark psychic sludge.