Draft Four: This is how we hurt

Don’t choose to fuel the fire.

Before we start: I had a hard time writing this week. I was physically weak, mentally exhausted (the Bucharest heat and humidity don’t help), and harboring a kind of sadness that threatened to close me off from the world. I pushed through because I remembered something Elif Shafak said in her wondrous essay-length book, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division: “Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.” I wrote grasping for some of this complexity. I feel the words are inadequate, but I trust you.

Some years back, me and my colleagues staged one of our many DoR Live shows in a 500-person movie theater. I love putting true stories on stage because it has a profound impact on a (literally) captive audience – when you are seated in a theater it’s harder to ignore a story in favor of your Insta feed. It’s why we tried to mix lighter fare with tougher stories, and for that evening we had everything from stand up, to contemporary dance, to a moving personal piece on trying not to break up with your family when coming out as transgender.

We also had a piece on Timișoara’s struggle with the crows and pigeons that were ruining parks and buildings, and the ridiculous ways the city tried to get rid of them. It was both a story about city hall incompetence, but also about stereotypes.

And we had a moving excerpt from a play on the slavery of Roma in Romania, told as the story of a young Roma woman discovering this history and confronting both her family (especially her brother, who worked for the Orthodox Church, the largest slave owner in these territories) as well as the academic establishment.

At the end of the show, the writer and director of the play told me she was hurt by the birds of Timișoara story. The use of the word “crow” was especially triggering to her, as it’s one of the most hurtful slang terms used for Roma.

In the afterglow of a show that went well, I was taken aback, and felt unfairly blamed. The story was not about that, I thought to myself. And if it did push anyone’s buttons, I thought they would provoke the opposite: enlightenment, not hurt. This probably shows how I mangled that interaction back then.

There was no intention for harm, yet I had caused it, and it was hard to deal with the cognitive dissonance. I didn’t want to take the blame for causing unintended harm, especially since the facts didn’t seem to support the argument.

Today, I hope I’d be wiser.

I hurt her without meaning to, and I’m sorry. If I paid more attention to the whole context, I could have seen that those two stories don’t belong together in the same show, because they communicate in invisible ways, some of which might cause hurt. I take responsibility for that choice, and I hope I’ll do better next time.

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Last year around this time a colleague told me she’d said “yes” to joining another newsroom. I was happy for her, because by that time we knew DoR would stop publishing, and I was hoping everyone would land on their feet. Yet I was also hurt. What hurt me was that she went through with the whole process – from interviewing, to deciding, to agreeing terms, without telling me.

I tried to articulate this, but most likely failed, and looked like someone that was hurting over something irrational. She had made a choice in her life, what business was it of mine? Why should I have been informed before she said “yes” to her new job?

I eventually stopped trying to get validation for this hurt. Also, I can easily argue why it shouldn’t have hurt: I was the boss, you don’t want extra stress from telling the boss you are thinking of leaving, it’s stressful enough to think about your future and changing workplaces and so on. My colleague did everything with the right intentions. And it still hurt.

I did everything with the best intentions when we put together that show. And one of the people involved still hurt.

And, damn it, all of us were right. These are not conflicts one wins. And no one should win them.

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Those of you who visited Romanian Facebook (which is like Westworld on steroids) over the last few days probably know where I’m going with this.

On Thursday morning, a prominent Roma civic activist, published an opinion piece about his feelings on reading a book of fiction that uses racist language. The author responded a few hours later in another opinion piece (in the same paper) that there is a difference between author and narrator, and that literature sometimes offends.

The whole social media chaos that followed was demoralizing. It upset, and it angered me. Because, as you can guess, everyone was right to some degree, but when chewed on social media, both men came away tainted with scores of invectives, ironies, tasteless humor, and further attacks that only amplified any hurt that was there in the first place. (This post, by poet and journalist Adela Greceanu, was among the few saving graces).

There are many nuances to this clash, but I’m interested in only a couple. First: can we accept a reader is hurt, even if we didn’t mean to hurt them? Can we accept there is pain there even if by “the standards” of the profession we didn’t do something wrong, either legally or ethically?

It seems one of the hardest things to process and discuss: We are right to hurt. Our hurt is valid. It should be acknowledged. And sometimes acknowledgement – rather than further punishment –is all we can ask for. No one should “win”, because these are not winnable arguments. They are our visions of the world bumping against one other.

They are moments of conflict, and this friction can be generative if handled well.

But we seem further and further from getting this right and our conflicts – especially on social media – get more and more destructive. Everyone comes out more bitter, more cynical, more ready to fight at the next available opportunity.

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The second thing I’m interested in is the responsibility of the publisher. Libertatea, who published the opinion pieces could have envisioned what followed. This is a place run by intelligent and empathetic editors, who know (and have studied) the power of an online crowd to turn into a ruthless mob.

Yet they published the first piece with an emotionally charged headline meant to stir discomfort and enrage. Which of course it did. The rage spilled over into social media, and what could have been an important conversation about literature, racism, the power of words – if handled differently – turned into a free for all. And it hurt many. (It’s telling that the publisher of the paper himself limited comments on his Facebook post announcing the publishing of the first piece. The author of the initial piece now said he now regrets publishing it.)

Sure, the paper is covered by the general standards of the profession. They hosted the stories, gave all parties involved a platform, did a wrap-up of the internet’s reaction a couple of days later, it’s not their responsibility what happens next. But that’s what internet platforms argue, too – we just host the party, we can’t be responsible if you bring a sledgehammer – and they’ve been shown to be detrimental to democracy itself.

I think publishers have a responsibility to think about what will happen when a piece comes out. Maybe 10-20 years ago we didn’t think about this. But today we know enough about how our minds work, about how social media works, and how it drives outrage that we ought to think about that when we make publishing decisions. (Research has shown that when exposed to negative content, people respond in the same way. In short, “anger reinforces echo chamber dynamics”.)

So, are we making people angry when we publish? Should we? Does an opinion piece provide the thoughtful argument this kind of topic requires? Do we publish anything well-known figures write? Or do we take an idea they had as a springboard for more constructive journalism? Does an inflammatory headline help or hinder understanding? Is our incentive for traffic at all costs – because our business model depends on it – compatible with conversation and connection? Are we at all responsible for the choices people make after engaging with our stories?

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I don’t need to be right. And I don’t need my position about what a publisher or journalist did to be the right one. That’s why I’m not publishing this on Facebook; because it’ll become binary, with very few people wrestling with the in-between.

The in-between, the complexity, the questions, is what I’m interested in.

That and how we could have done better, or can do better in the future.

*

What can we do better?

What I hope for myself and for you is that we don’t become “fire starters”, as Amanda Ripley calls them in High Conflict, a book I’ve mentioned and will keep mentioning in these letters. “Fire starters” are conditions that create conflict for the sake of conflict – they speed it up and spread it all around. And one of these fire starting conditions are “conflict entrepreneurs” – people who thrive on others fighting.

Politicians, definitely. But they can also be the gossipy colleague who’ll just pick apart a team, the neighbor who always protests they shouldn’t paying for the common facilities they’re not using, your friend who never misses the opportunity for sarcasm in a social media scandal. “Conflict entrepreneurs are often very important in people’s lives”, Ripley writes. “They can be loving, persuasive, and charismatic. The best ones make themselves essential. They become central to a group’s identity, and without them, it’s harder to feel like there’s an us.”

Amanda says that until we sideline conflict entrepreneurs, our chances of productive conflict will be low. She also says that many of us journalists have been very successful at being conflict entrepreneurs, at making or keeping people angry, scared, hurt.

I was at a presentation this April about journalism user needs – what people might want from us – and the journalist, who used to work for the BBC, wryly said: you’ll notice make me angry is not on this list of need, because I don’t think you should do journalism to get people angry.

But then you consume the work of even the most reputable outlets, and that’s what you feel: they want to make us angry. You see journalists you trust on social media opining about the world as it is, and that’s what you feel: they want to make us angry. I saw one journalist write a column about how naïve we are thinking someone will protect us. His conclusion? “The reality is that everyone is on their own.” To me, that’s not just cynical, it’s being oblivious to your own power.

Here’s Ripley in an interview: “Increasingly, and this is so painful, I see these more rigorous news outlets start to fall into a lesser, but still harmful, version of conflict entrepreneurship. One of the diabolical things about high conflict as a system is that eventually you start to mimic the tendencies of your adversary. Sooner or later, if you are in an us versus them kind of feud, you will start to mimic them, whether you notice it or not, whether you mean to or not.”

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Sooner or later, if you are in an us versus them kind of feud, you will start to mimic them.

I bet you have felt that recently.

Maybe you’ve even acted on it.

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There have been a lot of systemic failures leading to tragedies recently in Romania: the squalid elderly care homes; the 19-year-old who ran his car into a group of eight, killing two teens; the woman who died in the obstetric ward of her city hospital, ignored by the staff, and saying “I have no air”; the warehouse explosions next to Bucharest.

One can sense rage mixing with the heat and humidity, a cloud of gloom taking over our cities.

People raging online. People raging in the streets.

Officials – elected or appointed – doing nothing.

Being arrogant.

Deflecting responsibility.

Never apologizing.

How can you not want to burn everything down?

How can you not paint the system as the other?

How can you not want to make them feel some of your pain?

*

This has been hard to write, and I feel I’m not making enough sense.

I’ve also been battling a stomach virus for the past few days, which has made it hard to get off the couch. I’ve felt sad, and angry, and powerless. I also felt guilty for choosing to go on with my life – to worry about ordering light fixtures for the apartment, for example.

Words fail me when I talk about all that divides us and how we ourselves make the divisions worse. How we hurt each other when, supposedly, we mean well. How we feel so alone and unseen in our pain.

Because we are.

We have enough of a hard time, as people, telling each other: I see your pain. I’m sorry.

But we almost never hear this from the institutions we’re in a social contract with: the condo board, the utilities company, city hall, the hospital, the school, the ministry of whatever, your elected representative, the state agency of your choice, the police, the prime minister, the president.

Very few of them have ever said: I see your pain. I’m sorry.

Of course that’s not enough – the contract also says you should go ahead and fix it: make sure there’s hot water running through the city, make sure traffic stops are run correctly, make sure we don’t die in a hospital etc.

But I believe we’d be less angry if there was more humility, accompanied by taking responsibility. If the standard response wasn’t deflection: that’s not our fault; it’s the previous guy! You don’t understand our procedures! Next question! You are just trying to smear us! We have everything we need!

We don’t have everything, we don’t have procedures, and it doesn’t matter what the previous guy or girl did. Try and live with the potential dissonance. Accept that we are hurting, even if you don’t feel you caused the pain, and even if that pain wasn’t caused on purpose. (I look at the Spanish football federation actively going after their women players who just won the World Cup, and I can’t believe how officials can turn what should have been a profuse apology into a savage attack.)

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“In a world that is ever shifting and unpredictable, I’ve come to believe it is totally fine not to feel fine”, Elif Shafak writes in How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. “It is perfectly okay not to be okay. If truth be told, if from time to time you do not catch yourself overwhelmed with worry and indecision, demoralised and exhausted, or even incandescent, maybe you are not really following what is going on – here, there and everywhere. We have legitimate reasons to be despondent. When nothing seems solid or stable any more, it is vital that we acknowledge the diverse and protean nature of our emotions. It follows that we should stop judging and shaming ourselves for not being the always happy and fulfilled citizens to which we are told we must aspire.

But acknowledging the dark side of emotions is only where we begin.

It cannot be where we end up.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. “I am the colour red, in a world of black and white”, used to be a catch phrase of Bray Wyatt, a WWE wrestler who passed away unexpectedly this week, at 36. This saddened me. Wyatt found refuge in wrestling and its art of storytelling, he found a place for his own darkness there, and had this to say about social media and its impact on mental health: “You have no idea how much a simple, thoughtless comment on social media can directly affect the person you are sending it to. With great power comes great responsibility. The negativity in our world is astonishing. And mental health is at an all time decline. Be better… it could save a life. They saved mine.”

2. If you want to start the Fall as a better version of yourself, the Hidden Brain podcast has you covered. Here’s how to break out of a rut and here’s how you can set better goals for future you.

3. So much social media scandals have led to many more public apologies. Not all work. Here’s how to do it better.

4. Plenty of reading recommended in the text itself. A reminder that Amanda Ripley and Elif Shafak’s books have both been translated into Romanian. (The links take you to Cărturești).

5. Matt Shirley and his Instagram charts always makes me feel good. Especially his latest on getting your shit together.