From Covid to Ukraine

Shattered time, flattened narratives, and an ever-escalating series of crises

Photo credit: Kira Hoffmann on Pixabay

It feels like Russia’s shock invasion of Ukraine changed everything. But did it really? I have no idea. What I do know is that what somehow passes for “reality” suddenly turned on a dime. It’s been heart-wrenching, head-spinning, and mind-numbing, this abrupt shift from Covid, Covid, Covid, to Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.

Just a few weeks ago, everything (at least in the Blue State bubble where I live) was still about Covid and nothing but Covid, just as it had been for the interminable last two years. But then, only four days before we were finally about to lift our mask and vaccine mandates, the world shifted so abruptly, it felt like a blow to the head. I couldn’t think clearly for days.

As my social media feeds filled up with terrible, terrifying, heartbreaking photos of Ukrainians fighting, fleeing, and moving into subway stations-turned-makeshift bomb shelters with their children and pets, I could suddenly imagine being in such a situation myself. Watching war break out while drinking coffee in the morning or working comfortably at my computer felt privileged to the point of obscenity. And listening to pundits rant about the imminent danger of World War 3 was so scary, parts of my brain simply shut down.

International power politics are not my forte. I don’t know nearly enough about the evolution of the EU, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, and the role of the US in it all to have anything remotely close to an in-depth understanding of what’s been going on politically and why. But even if I did, what difference would it make? I’m not in any position to influence what happens.

So I donate to the Ukrainian relief effort and hope that a diplomatic solution is somehow brokered so that the war stops soon. It doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t begin to assuage the deeply uncomfortable feelings of empathy provoked by the most cursory following of the news. Even half a world away and with no personal ties to what’s happening, hearing about how ordinary Ukrainian people are being ruthlessly attacked day after day casts a shadow of melancholy and apprehension over everyday life.

Scrambled Time

It’s only been a few weeks since the Russian invasion. Yet it feels like a different era already. The world before it happened, when speculations it might were widely dismissed as over-the-top, seems so long ago it’s hard to remember. Which is absolutely insane. How is such a mind-wrenching shift even possible?

How can the memory of an unprecedented two-year pandemic that caused, among other things, over six million deaths globally and 960,000 nationally; horrendous social and political division; mass spikes in anxiety, depression, and addiction; and an incalculable loss of educational and social development among children and youth be so rapidly eclipsed? Covid dominated our lives for the past two years. Countless people are still shell-shocked and reeling.

And of course, it’s not really over yet. We’ve simply shifted to the “endemic” phase — which, it seems, could ramp up into another (real or manufactured) crisis at any time over fears of a new surge or variant. Where I live, most people continue to wear masks though it’s no longer mandated — even when walking alone, outside, through an open park or quiet residential area. Why? I don’t know. Personally, I find it ambiently discomforting. Regardless, it’s the new normal.

As has this sense of flipping relentlessly from crisis to crisis, with each one seeming so urgently all-encompassing, it erases the last. That’s the new normal, too. By this time, the (Blue State bubblers’) false hope that a Biden victory, followed by an efficient vaccine rollout, would happily usher in a “return to normalcy” by — um, what was it again? — last Spring? — has been not only thoroughly dashed, but virtually forgotten.

My sense of time is thoroughly scrambled. I had to check the dates to remember that Summer 2021 — well less than a year ago! — was when “Delta” became the dominant strain in the U.S., and a whole new wave of Covid anxieties and restrictions revved up once again after a brief reprieve. It’s hard to recall the time before Omicron (and now, Ukraine), but after Alpha and 19 — which itself was only just over two years ago.

The onset of Covid feels more like 5 or 6 years ago, not two. Or maybe even 20, in the sense that the pre-Covid world seems so far away and long ago that it’s hard to viscerally connect with the memory of what everyday life used to look and feel like. To me, the widespread reluctance to de-mask feels like a collective statement that the level of taken-for-granted ease that used to exist — back when it was fine to breathe freely outside or even in a grocery store — has been rejected, forgotten, or culturally recoded in ways I can’t decipher and don’t understand.

Ever-Escalating Crises

Of course, Covid has not been the only crisis of the past six years. Far, far from it. Honestly, after the initial wrenching shock of Trump’s 2016 victory, did they ever stop coming?

There was (and remains) the ongoing war between MAGA and the #Resistance. There was the panic over the “alt-right.” And Charlottesville. And Russiagate. And wokeism and cancel culture. There was #MeToo, Trans Rights Activism, #BLM, George Floyd, and “defund the police.” The 1619 Project, Antifa, QAnon, January 6th, CRT. The Texas abortion law. And, of course, the endless string of crises centered on a single individual: Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Brett Kavanaugh, J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan . . . the list goes on.

Who can possibly keep track? And who even wants to?

Because if you pay too much attention to it, the reality of living in a society that’s lurching relentlessly from crisis to crisis is psychologically dislocating and emotionally distressing. We humans are wired to want a sense of meaning. We like to feel that we can locate what’s happening today in a coherent narrative that connects with the past and arcs into the future.

And that can feel impossible if you think too deeply into questions such as: What are the deeper origins of the current crisis du jour? Are the dominant takes that purport to explain it truly compelling? If not (as is almost always the case), what might more thoughtful and constructive ways to understand and address it be? And how, in practical terms, could we as a society best move in that direction?

These would be great questions to ask were it not for the fact that doing so puts you sharply at odds with the dominant culture, which demands simplistic, hashtaggable answers to complex, difficult questions. Consequently, to pause long enough to get out of an emotionally reactive mode and into a rationally reflective one starts to feel ill-advised. Better to jump on the latest bandwagon. Or (to mix metaphors) tune it all out and stay out of the fray.

The problem is that each one-note hashtagged crisis is, in fact, embedded in a complex web of serious issues that need to be pragmatically addressed. And we’re not doing that. And so the actual and potential destructiveness of each successively hyped crisis becomes exponentially worse.

Authoritarian Dynamics

A few days ago, Sarah Hepola, a writer best known for her 2016 memoir about going sober after years of blackout drinking, published a controversial article in The Atlantic saying that she’s starting to feel ready to share some of her many non-PC thoughts about #MeToo. That’s cool — I’d love to read them, but — it’s been four years. Yet, she’s currently attracting a lot of positive and negative attention simply for stating publically that she might be ready to write about it.

To be sure, I don’t blame her for her silence at all. She’s trying to make a living as a writer, a viciously competitive and financially precarious business. Plus, Hepola’s description of how the recent cultural climate has impacted professional writers and journalists rings true:

I’d spent the past five or so years watching celebrities, pundits, friends, and internet randos fall from grace for reasons as varied as sharing dumb jokes, making clumsy writing errors, accidentally showing their dong, and expressing controversial (though often widely held) opinions in the public execution chambers of social media . . . I could not risk the personal and professional blowback that might accompany stepping into the wrong lane. I’d long considered myself a liberal and a feminist, but I’d grown terrified of being banished for views I considered reasonable, or at least worth discussing — but maybe, but what about, but actually. Every day, I scrolled the endless river of outrage and all-caps, watching people express similar views to mine only to be pounced upon. Once-celebrated writers were being publicly rebranded as ghoulish, pieces of trash, red-pilled. The unwritten rule of elite media tribes seemed to be this: You spout the company line, or you shut up . . . Going against the online outrage machine could be career suicide.

It’s not just writers and journalists who self-censor in this environment. It’s also scholars, teachers, students, artists, activists, and really anyone who finds themselves thinking twice before asking potentially troublesome questions, let alone airing an alternative point of view.

Last November 2021, PBS’s Margaret Hoover interviewed the renowned Chinese artist and dissident intellectual Ai Weiwei on “Firing Line.” Disconcertingly, Weiwei stated that in his opinion, American culture had turned dangerously authoritarian:

AI WEIWEI: In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

MARGARET HOOVER: How so?

AI WEIWEI: Many things happening today in U.S. can be compared to the Cultural Revolution in China.

MARGARET HOOVER: Like what?

AI WEIWEI: Like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness. That is very dangerous. You want to go deeper?

MARGARET HOOVER: Actually, that was the next thing I was going to ask you about it. So what kind of political correct extremism?

AI WEIWEI: It’s very philosophical. With today’s technology, we know so much more than we really understand. The information becomes jammed. But we don’t really have the knowledge because . . . You don’t have to act on anything. You just think you’re purified by certain ideas that you agree with. That is posing dangers to society, to an extremely divided society.

The Sound of Silence

Whether or not you think Weiwei’s correct, the fact that such an esteemed artist, who’s known globally for his human rights activism and anti-authoritarian dissent, would issue such a warning is newsworthy. Naturally, however, since his statement doesn’t fit the dominant left-liberal narrative, it wasn’t covered by The New York Times or NPR — but it did run on Fox. (True, the interview was initially aired on PBS. But Weiwei’s comments about American authoritarianism clearly came as a surprise/mistake, as Hoover opened the topic by invoking the dangers of Trumpism and obviously expected him to follow her lead. Instead, he pivoted to present a very different point of view.)

Such selective reporting is standard in our siloed information system; many similar examples could be provided. But I’ll just point out one that’s been particularly on my mind lately: Black Lives Matter. Specifically, the contrast between the tremendous amount of media attention devoted to the broadly defined #BLM movement and the infinitesimal number of articles on what happened with the leading organization associated with it, Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN). I’ll focus on The New York Times in particular since 1) it’s the leading light of left-liberal thought and opinion, and 2) I have a subscription and can access their full database.

So: A search for articles on “Black Lives Matter” from January 2020 to the present yields 4,693 results. But a search “Black Lives Matter Global Network finances” yields 7 — and, of these, only one actually addresses the topic. And this article, published in June 2021, is long outdated.

In January 2022, the Washington Examiner published a shocking update on what happened with BLMGN since that time:

No one appears to have been in charge at (BLMGN) for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity's two board members won't say who controls its $60 million bankroll . . . BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group's senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don't know who now leads the nation's most influential social justice organization . . . (a) reporter attempted to request BLM's 2020 Form 990 in person at the charity's office in Los Angeles, which the group disclosed as the location its books are stored in previous filings submitted to the IRS, only to be told by a security guard that there has never been a BLM office at the location.

Predictably, this story was picked up by other conservative media outlets. But it was wholly ignored by The New York Times and NPR. The only outlet on the left-liberal side of the spectrum to cover it was New York magazine. Further left, democratic socialist and former Sanders 2020 press secretary Brianna Joy Gray podcasted an excellent interview with that article’s author, Sean Campbell. But that was it.

Considering that the Times published 4,693 articles on BLM since 2020, one might think that at least one update on the organization that scooped up a cool $90 million in the movement’s name would be warranted. But no — since it doesn’t fit the narrative, it doesn’t exist in that media universe.

Meanwhile, 15 independent BLM chapters across the country have jointly issued multiple public statements calling for accountability, transparency, and support from BLMGN. They even developed a website to publicize their cause. So, criticism of BLMGN can’t be written off as a right-wing smear campaign. Plus, bracketing the many other issues it raises, there’s no question that such a major rift between the flagship organization that’s raking in millions and the grassroots activists who most often get nothing merits more than one outdated New York Times article.

Laughably, during the same period that the Times was ignoring such major developments with BLM, it published 2,903 articles on “misinformation.” Maybe they need to start a new focus on “resolutely ignored information” . . . But seriously, I can only surmise that the reason they don’t publish stories such as BLMGN’s $90 million absconding is that they think it’s not what their affluent progressive liberal subscribers (not to mention, woke young staffers) want to hear.

Such omissions are an abuse of the public trust that far too many good-hearted and well-intentioned people continue to invest in them. This isn’t to suggest that the Times doesn’t still have some terrific journalists and top-notch reporting — it does. Nor is it to insinuate they’re a unique problem in our information ecosystem — they’re not. Since I’m far more familiar and concerned with the left-liberal side of the political spectrum, I tend to focus there. But there’s no doubt that the same thing happens with right-wing media. In fact, as I’ve discussed previously, the two feed off each other.

True, there are a few well-established independent journalists and news organizations out there. But when five mega-conglomerates own 90 percent of all U.S. media, including newspapers, magazines, book publishers, movie studios, and radio/TV stations, such alternatives play only a tiny role in the information ecosystem.

And it’s that system, in combination with the similarly consolidated tech sector, that’s fueling both the ever-escalating series of crises and the attendant sense that you either need to 1) fall into line with whatever narrative purportedly represents your “side,” or 2) keep quiet. This sorry situation is powerfully driven by the business models that now dominate our corporate media/social media/big tech complex. Unfortunately, the fact that this problem has become increasingly recognized doesn’t mean that it’s even come close to being solved.

So the emotionally turbo-charged hashtaggable crises keep coming. And our sense of a coherent narrative that connects the past, present, and future flattens to whatever two-dimensional storyline can be crammed in those boxes. And the artificially simplistic storylines about what are, in fact, serious and complex societal problems keep changing. And asking questions about them (at least before so much time has gone by that the questions no longer matter) continues to feel and perhaps actually be ill-advised, if not dangerous.

Brain Fog of War

And now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, these now well-established cultural patterns and media dynamics are playing out in a situation that could potentially escalate into nuclear war. It’s terrifying. Hopefully, the political and military leaders who have the power to impact the course of this war will be maximally thoughtful, prudent, and cautious, no matter how much countervailing pressure is brought to bear. Hopefully, some sort of diplomatic solution will be brokered. Hopefully, the death, destruction, and suffering will end soon.

And hopefully, now that the American public is being inundated with media reports that convey some realistic sense of just how horrific war really is, we’ll start questioning what’s been happening with our own military operations more seriously. Although I doubt it. Because the media blackout on the destruction the U.S. has wrought worldwide since the onset of the “War on Terror” has been so thorough, even those of us who try to keep up on the news really have no idea what’s been going on.

Brown University’s “Costs of War Project” documents the human, economic, and environmental costs of America’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the related violence in Pakistan and Syria:

Source: Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University (2022)

Some of the Costs of War Project’s findings include:

• Over 929,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war.

• Over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting.

• 38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.

• The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.

• The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties in the U.S. and abroad.

Last September, President Biden cited data from the Costs of War Project in his speech announcing his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. At the time, I was shocked to hear him say that this military involvement had cost us $300 million a day for two decades.

Again: $300 million a day for two decades. How is this even possible? I can’t begin to wrap my head around those numbers.

What else could we have been doing with this money? Where did it all go? Why wasn’t this revelation more of a scandal? There are a lot of questions that can and should be publically asked and discussed — but aren’t.

Today, I’m concerned that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being used as a way to rally Americans around the flag in yet another two-dimensional crisis narrative. This time, it’s the Cold War redux, boiled down to its most basic faux-moral polarity: Russia’s evil and we’re good. In a war situation that could escalate unpredictably, such simplistic binary thinking is dangerous. Not to mention, it certainly doesn’t encourage us to question what’s been happening with our own direct and proxy wars, which have also caused enormous suffering.

The more scared and disoriented we are, the harder it is to think critically. It’s a trauma response: Our brains shut down enough to enable us to feel less overwhelmed and more able to do whatever we need to do to get through the day. This is natural, understandable, and even at times extremely helpful on an individual level. But there’s something deeply pernicious about the ways in which such dynamics have been engulfing the culture, flattening everyday life, and channeling our sense of society into overly simplistic “us-versus-them” narratives.

We need new and better narratives to help us make sense of a rapidly-changing world in more caring and constructive ways. The more we can resist two-dimensional thinking, the more room there is for such needed creativity to flourish. But the longer the war in Ukraine continues, the more difficult this will be. Hopefully, a peace agreement will be brokered soon. In the meantime, there isn’t much that most of us can do on that front except donate aid, bear witness, and (if it’s in your wheelhouse) pray.

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