2024 election – One Rabbit Riot

The Roar of Social Media

For a land of opportunity and abundance, there are certainly a lot of conflicting opinions on that statement. Some people are quite in touch with the struggles of inflation and the economy and others are participating in conspicuous consumption. Some are lamenting in blue and some are gloating in red, others are calling for retrospection and unity, but one thing has been the common thread – it’s a bigger knot of problems than I ever expected, and untangling this is going to take more time than I think most people are willing to give it.

There is impatience and aggression. A celebration of nastiness on every level that I am shocked by. How long has this nasty edge been living under the surface waiting for us to notice its venom? How does the simple act of Patrick Ta’s eyeshadow being priced at $42 become a hotbed of elitism and premeditated nastiness towards complete strangers on the internet? It’s bizarre and I can only guess it has nothing to do with eyeshadow and more with a deep level of dissatisfaction in our current world.

Loss of Gentleness

I saw increasing pressure from political ads this year to be afraid of what lurks in the blue and the red. The election is over yet I am still getting ads targeting this fear and exploiting our peace for the sake of agenda. It is maddening and disheartening to me that we are allowing our peace to be stolen. Especially the peace of those most vulnerable in society.

I’m observing responses from people I follow who are letting their fear isolate them. I saw a call to clear out friends lists “to control what you can” like burning bridges is healthy advice for all situations. It can be, but it can also lead to a lot of pain and loneliness. Acting on emotions is a shifting sand. When your emotions change how can your choices be healthy and stable in the long run? There is more chance of self-sabotage than true desire.

I have been a bridge burner and when I look back at what fueled my decisions, it was not a healthy mindset. It was one deep in crisis allowing the self-destructive nature to keep me from moving forward. I’m also not writing this to judge anyone. I’m writing this from a place of concern to keep others from making the same mistakes as me. Mistakes that I wish I could take back.

One thing I have taken from these last few weeks is the importance of gentleness and patience. We are fully capable of living in a community with others who disagree with us if we choose to be gracious to one another and respect healthy boundaries. Not playing on each others’ fear or looking for fights. That’s just plain mean and not how you maintain relationships. That has been the number one thing I have noticed through this 2024 election cycle, is the lack of focus on America being one community and learning how to work with each other in our differences.

Truth and Realignment

I’m not saying my culture needs to let bullies keep bullying or evil take root for the sake of peace. I think we need to kick bad out and leave room for the good and the truth to flourish. What I am saying is that I think we need to pause, take a breath, and be willing to try reconciling. If it’s bad and causes more pain, okay, then we stop and reevaluate, but I don’t think it would be.

I think my fellow citizens are weary and lonely. We need each other to embrace our differences to see that we have more common ground than we have let agendas tell us we do.

Thinking purple instead of red and blue would be a good start. Abandoning the scarcity mindset would also be a healthy move toward letting go of fear. Especially as believers, there is nothing to fear if we fully surrender to God.

This has just been on my heart lately, dear reader, and I hope I haven’t offended you. I’ve been feeling creatively off from the sheer amount of negativity being spread. It is draining as an HSP neurodivergent introvert who seeks to spread kindness and love yet can’t fix the pain of people in my community. I wish I could and maybe this post is at least a safe space to ponder and start new conversations? I’m trying to focus on the positive.

We will also be back to our regularly scheduled programming of sewing, knitting, art, Bible Study, and K-pop content soon. This just felt too important to ignore.

Thank you for taking time with me today. I hope you know that you are loved and worthy. Until next time 🫶

What is historical bias? As I dove deeper into my historical training, it became the elephant in the room of every class discussion and the turf monster of every thesis. It is where worldview intersects with historical interpretation and constructs an invisible wall between historical accuracy and interpretation in our present.

Even with firsthand accounts or eyewitness testimony of events, personal bias, and interpretation passively or actively weave themselves into the evidence. It is inescapable.

Something that I’ve gleaned, with a better understanding of, has been from listening to Biblical scholars meditate through the Greek and Hebrew translations of the Bible aka primary sources. It is truly an extraordinary work to ponder accounts from the past and sift through the biases we have as moderns to catch a fleeting moment of connection with the past filled with as deep of empathy for their pov as we can.

It is fleeting because the easier and more common way we interact with history is through quick and heavily biased source material.

A thesis-first and evidence-second approach, instead of first studying the evidence and letting it reveal the thesis is how we as humans prefer to communicate. But what we will gain if we let the text talk to us. Letting the text speak is similar to the Socratic method except instead of a conversation with people, you let the sources speak.

This does not translate well to our current pace of consuming information. It is slow and requires patience to study and understand the matter at hand from many angles. Therefore the “pop press” way of disseminating information, like the History Channel so often uses, rises from the ashes once again to the far reaches of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

This is not to say that only bad history or bad thesis drafting is a product of social media. I’ve learned wonderful details about a vast array of histories, fashion, language, and culture through these social platforms that I couldn’t have had access to at college, because the experts didn’t exist. Dress History wasn’t even a widely accepted specialty during my time in college. Social Media has provided a platform for niche history lovers to share their passion with a new audience. Social Media also provides a salon of discussion to debunk myths or provide deeper context to a subject that was given the “pop press” treatment.

So why am I writing about this today? I was watching a video from a creator who used to be a fantastic source of fashion and film content, a 2000s historian of girlhood with insightful and researched evidence that let the text speak. The original work was so high caliber that this current slump into heavily biased “historical” fashion videos and content that is just politics loosely veiled as film or fashion-focused, has been a great disappointment to me. The creator is so talented, and to see them be swayed by forces that are in our culture is sad.

Not only a disappointment, but it has shown me how important it is to stay committed to awareness of historical biases and the humble acknowledgment that we can’t talk in absolutes when it comes to interpretation. We have to be open to exploring the sources from many points of view and not let ourselves be mouthpieces of modernity, with the clever out of “victors write history” so what is the point of going deeper.

Victors certainly change history and can try to control its narrative, but history is the story of humanity and is bigger than one group’s manipulation.

For example, in my wheelhouse, I am the descendant of Irish immigrants who were potato farmers in Cork. The Potato Famine was discussed historically as just a blight. Bad luck. Not a big deal. Oh well. The crisis was met with such apathy that Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift, wrote “A Modest Proposal” to draw attention to the British attitude towards the Irish was not unlike the absurdity of his proposal.

But now, we know that this event can be classified as a genocide because the British colonized Ireland for centuries. There was enough food in Ireland until the British stole it and imported it out of their colony of Ireland. The “victors” affect history but their version is not the guaranteed final version forever. They inflict death and destruction but this will not stay in the shadows forever, the light is greater than the dark.

My point is that this summation, “The victors write history” is paltry.

So what started this ramble of historical bias?

A video essay about the history of the Goth aesthetic which had random political bias inserted as fact and a lack of nuance to the conclusions based on a clearly preconceived thesis where evidence was cherry-picked to fill out a video that wasn’t really about Goth style. It was about our Nov 5, 2024 election and unnecessarily put a lot of negativity out into the world instead of talking about the Goth aesthetic.

I believe it’s time that we as a society stop stirring up dissension and casual hate in the name of the political savior. These candidates never save anything. They try their best but they are just humans. Is it worth hating an entire group of people because they hold different views? Never.

No human is perfect, so how can human government create a perfect society? It’s a straw man.

I hope in time, the strong political biases I see swaying storytelling in my culture will sour. Instead, I hope an appetite for deep discussion to understand each side of the coin will spring forth. For truth, for the sake of truth, warts and all. For deeper connection. To understand what people believe and why they believe, with mutual respect, and respect for the biases we hold so that we don’t let our biases keep us from true understanding and continue to fertilize this culture of casual hate I am seeing in 2024.

I hope this post is not too convoluted. I wanted to discuss this without saying what creator I am referring to because it is not them I want to critique but the fallacy they have fallen under and the way they are approaching history, politics, and interpretation of these things without the awareness of their personal bias. It’s creating foolish and unuseful content that reads more as pop press propaganda than well-researched discussion, which is what I think they excel at doing. I believe they are amazing and I want to see their talent shine once again!

Bias is such a difficult thing to wrestle with and I acknowledge that no matter how I tried to check mine at the door, it still persists. I try to hold it loosely and pursue the truth, but I am an imperfect human.

Thank you, reader, for being here and I hope this was an interesting ramble if nothing else. If I have offended you, I humbly ask for your grace and willingness to love others – enemy or friend, because that is how we will make this world a better place.