The darkness around us is deep

So many prepackaged memes we can all post are out there, some thoughtful and some seemingly not so much.

I wonder if we have a chance to get the two political parties to improve, to be more responsive, if we keep sending each other kinda-true, sorta-true, maybe-not-very-true meme postings and comments instead of trying to be precise and accurate when we speak to each other, so we can count on each other more. So we can know where we stand together, know what the other person needs help with.

Then maybe we can speak more strongly and precisely to elected officials. Many of them like our silence. Many of them take advantage of our confusion. Many of them know that in the jangle of social media it’s easy to manipulate and to crowd out good sense.

Some of them have said explicitly that they don’t have to use censorship when they can, instead, just “flood the zone” with nonsense, which we sometimes help them do with our repostings and comments when we don’t take care to go beyond the is too-is not style we probably learned as children.

The stakes are very real, as you know.

I have to read this poem slowly. At the end William Stafford says that “the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: [because] the darkness around us is deep.”