Where I'm Going, Where I've Been

Anatomy of a Perspective Shift

I was never more liked than when I was a terrible person.

It might just be, in the final analysis, that I have always been and will always be a terrible person. The truth is, I think we all are, in our own ways, terrible. I think we have to wrestle every day with our better angels to not be terrible. Every exchange with another human being or animal, every choice made, every relationship, every opinion, and everything we invest our time and money into thinking will either be defined as good or defined as terrible. I guess it depends on whose judgment we care about most. If you are religious, that question is already answered for you. If you aren’t religious, you might find other movements or influences to guide you towards goodness. Or terribleness.

I was especially terrible heading into the election of 2016. Like so many online, the Blue Checks! I believed that the way to convince or persuade others to my side was the right course. It seems so silly now. My best excuse is that the algorithms do strange things to the brain. When each platform wants you to be as controversial as possible, to drive engagement as much as possible, it doesn’t exactly bring out the best in people. The worse it gets, the more you are rewarded for it. Take a look at any person on Twitter who has a large platform. Sooner or later most of them use it to publicly shame other people.

This was as true for Trump as it was for anyone. If he’d used the platform the way other politicians do - give it over to some staffer - he probably would still be POTUS. Or maybe not. Who knows. But it is clear that Trump was as rewarded for his inhumanity on Twitter as anyone else. It has actually helped Trump not just politically, but for his own personal mental health, to be banned.

We can’t yet know the big picture effects of social media on our world, our country, and ourselves, so for now, I’d like to instead take personal responsibility.

I believed I was a warrior saving the planet from climate change and the only thing standing in my way was evil Republicans, or even more evil Bernie bros. I was 100% convinced of this. Not only could nothing shake my resolve, but I was rewarded daily with lots and lots of praise and engagement. It wasn’t that I didn’t make enemies. After the 2016 election, I could not even attend my family’s Thanksgiving. My brother was a Trump supporter and a good number of my family were Bernie supporters or Clinton haters. I just could not bear the conversations that I imagined would happen around the election.

My sister and I got in a screaming match over my father’s corpse. No joke. The day he died we were screaming at each other about whether Bernie would have won. She believed he would have. I, of course, knew there was zero chance of that happening. My friend Clara had to intervene, screaming something like, “not in front of your dead father!”

As the nurse handed me my father’s Veteran’s flag he said, “On behalf of the United States of America and Donald J. Trump…” I burst out laughing. Stupid, terrible laughter as my father lay there frozen in his bed. Dead and cold and all the way gone. I can’t even relate to that person now. I can’t even imagine feeling that way about either Trump or Bernie or Hillary such that it would take precedent over such a personal thing as the death of my father.

It all seems so pointless now, all of that anger, all of that energy, all of that time. I’d like to say that my father’s death woke me up to the precious minutes we have on this earth, but it wasn’t that at all. It was the Tom Cotton op-ed disaster at the New York Times. The gaslighting by the media and the Blue Checks on Twitter always pushed their narrative but rarely confronted actual reality. The goal was to bring down Trump. Everything else came secondary, even the truth. Nothing has shaken that desire to control the narrative, even with Trump gone.

I found out just how bad it would be to start asking questions. I had no idea just how threatening it was to simply step out of line. It was not only threatening, it was relationship-ending. But once I started asking, I could not stop. Then I guess I went from being one kind of terrible person to another. Now I have no limits of what I won’t watch, what I won’t read, or whom I will or won’t talk to. I force myself to favorite tweets of people who are on the verboten list. I try hard to not self-censor whenever possible. The one thing I refuse to do is dehumanize anyone.

I know most people believe they are fighting on the right side of “good.” But fear does strange things to people. It has taken us to a dark place, maybe even a dangerous place.

We tend to look back on terrible events in our past and have clarity about which side was good and which side was evil. What we forget is that the people doing things history would recognize as evil believed they themselves were combating evil. The Germans believed they were building a utopian society. So did the Bolsheviks. So did Jim Jones and Charles Manson and every other cult leader or guru who came out of the 1970s. Perspective is everything.

Most of the writing I’ve done since moving from one point of view to another is here on Substack. But the writing I used to do was on the more left-leaning site Medium. And now it sits there, a relic of the terrible person I used to be, written permanently in internet ink.

It’s all here. On Medium. As a faithful member of the “hashtag Resistance,” I fought alongside the Blue Checks like a good soldier. I was fighting the Russian trolls. I was helping to save the world from Trump, whom I also thought was an existential threat. I was studying Putin and looking for all of the ways he’d rigged the election. I was researching everything Steve Bannon ever said looking for the smoking gun that would show he was a wanna-be Hitler ready to make America a White Nationalist’s paradise. I believed in Adam Schiff and Rachel Maddow.

I went along with everything. I questioned nothing. Now it’s just the opposite. I go along with nothing and I question everything.

I leave these headlines here for you to take a look at as a reminder of just how dramatically people can change if they are willing and open to that possibility.

May 5, 2016 - The Day Trump and Bernie Supporters United Against Hillary with a Hashtag

May 16, 2016 - The Revolution Happened, but It Happened on the Right

May 29, 2016 -Bernie Sanders Falsely Relies on National Match-Up Polls, and He’s Misleading his Supporters

Jun 3, 2016 - The Bernie Sanders I Thought I Knew Is Gone

Jun 7, 2016 - How Sanders Supporters Can Turn Losing into Winning

Jun 11, 2016 - Okay Bernie Bros — You Lost. Either Go to Trump/Stein or Go Away

Jun 28, 2016 - Bernie Sanders in the New York Times — YOU, Senator, are the Problem

Jun 28, 2016 - Trump Fundraising Email is Quite Horrifying, Appeals to Bernie Supporters

Jul 5, 2016 - Miranda’s Hamilton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Remaking of America

Jul 13, 2016 - Top Five Reasons why you Can’t Compare 2008 with 2016

Jul 23, 2016 - Bernie or Bust Supporters Continue to Sabotage Clinton Just to Prove a Point

Jul 29, 2016 - How it Must Feel to Have Angry Protesters Staring You Down on the Night of Your Life

Aug 4, 2016 - Sorry Gavin Polone, I Can’t Waste Time Worrying About What Another Privileged White Man Thinks…

Sep 14, 2016 - If You are Voting for Jill Stein, Here is What I know About You

Sep 17, 2016 - I dreamed Donald Trump was president

Sep 23, 2016 - Why the Green Party Has Destroyed Itself with Jill Stein

Oct 17, 2016 - For Hillary Clinton: The Girl Who Dared.

Oct 18, 2016 - We Were There for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, They Were Not There for Us

Nov 1, 2016 - Three Reasons Why Hillary Clinton’s Emails are Different from Nixon’s Watergate

Nov 18, 2016 - It’s Time for Bernie Sanders to Apologize to his Supporters, and to President Obama

Nov 22, 2016 - Ten Reasons Bernie Sanders Would not and Could not have beaten Trump

Dec 23, 2016 - Don’t Be Fooled — It Wasn’t Only Trump Supporters Who Got Baited by Fake News — the Left Fell for…

Jan 2, 2017 - The Democrats Can’t Win in 2020 Unless They Unite.

Feb 1, 2017 - All the President’s Men— Part One: Putin and Bannon’s Shared Ideology

Feb 8, 2017 - It wasn’t just Mitch McConnell who silenced Elizabeth Warren — These senators did too.

Feb 11, 2017 - Hey Bernie Supporters — Stop Forcing Democrats to Agree to the Lie that the Primary Was Rigged.

Mar 4, 2017 - Don’t Try to Redefine this Country’s Greatness, Donald Trump.

Apr 17, 2017 - Democrats Choosing Sanders to Lead are Leaving Too Much of their Base Behind

Apr 23, 2017 - Tough Luck Destroyers of Hillary Clinton: You Won the Battle, You Won’t Win the War

May 26, 2017 - Hey Berniecrats, You Don’t Need to Destroy the Democratic Party to Launch a Movement

Jun 12, 2017 - Bernie Sanders Has Yet to Address the Way Misogyny and Russian Trolling Has Fueled His Movement

Jul 7, 2017 - Democrats Should Fight For, Not Discard, So-Called “Identity Politics”

Jul 14, 2017 - Why the GOP and the Bernie Left Don’t Care About “the Russia Story”

Sep 20, 2018 - An Open Letter to Dr Christine Blasey Ford — If You Choose to Testify, You Have an Army Standing…

Oct 8, 2018 - They Were Always Going to Confirm Kavanaugh — His Teary Raging Outburst Was to Rally the Base…

May 2, 2019 - Welcome to the Season Finale of the Donald J. Trump Show

May 11, 2019 - Joe Biden is the Best Bet Against Trump — What Stands in His Way? Fellow Democrats.

May 18, 2019 - “They’re Ratf*cking Themselves?” An Imaginary Interview with Richard Nixon from the Great Beyond

Jun 28, 2019 - Why Attacks on Joe Biden Will Continue to Backfire

Jul 22, 2019 - The Lessons Not Taken from 2016 — We Can’t Agree on How to Win Because We Can’t Agree on Why We…

Aug 12, 2019 - Feeling Alienated by the Outrage-driven Left but Still Want to Get Rid of Trump? You are not Alone.

Sep 13, 2019 - Attacks on Biden Still Backfire and Badly — That Makes Him Teflon Against Donald Trump

Oct 3, 2019 - Democrats Destroyed Joe Biden all on Their Own, Trump Need Not Have Bothered

Oct 4, 2019 - Democrats are Too Easily Played by Trump — and No Match for His Team in 2020

Oct 10, 2019 - Ellen DeGeneres and our Civil War of Ideology that Democrats are Losing

Dec 13, 2019 - I Didn’t Support Impeachment Until the Democrats Made Me Feel Proud to Be an American

Feb 5, 2020 - Mitt Romney: And So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World

Feb 6, 2020 - There is One Upside to Bernie Sanders Getting the Nomination: The Nightmare will Finally Be Over

Feb 17, 2020 - Top Five Reasons Trump Wants to Run Against Bernie Sanders

Feb 18, 2020 - Video: How Trump Took Advantage of Bernie’s Attacks on Hillary in 2016. It’s Starting Again

Feb 20, 2020 - The Democratic Debate was a Dystopian Nightmare

Feb 20, 2020 - Last Night’s Debate Performance was One of a Series of Bad Judgment Calls by Elizabeth Warren

Feb 21, 2020 - The Debate and the Direction of the Democratic Party Right Now Leaves No Room for People Like Me

Feb 23, 2020 - Elizabeth Warren Reaches a New Level of Desperation with Non-Stop Attacks on Bloomberg

Feb 21, 202 - Bernie Sanders is Just Like Donald Trump — He Does Not Seek to Govern All of the United States

Feb 26, 2020 - How Democratic Candidates Can Challenge Bernie Sanders

Feb 26, 2020 - It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

Feb 29, 2020 - A Good Man is Hard to Find — Joe Biden Crossed the Street to Talk to My Daughter’s Class in 2008

Mar 1, 2020 - It’s not too Late California! Vote for Joe Biden on Tuesday

Mar 2, 2020 - Open Letter to Mike Bloomberg

Mar 5, 2020 - Decency is Worth Fighting For — Why Joe Biden is the Man for this Moment

Mar 6, 2020 - Trump Was Hoping for Another 1972 but Democrats Just Made a Strategic Counter Play

Mar 9, 2020 - Top Five Reasons Trump Doesn’t Want to Run Against Joe Biden

Mar 13, 2020 - Joe Biden CAN Win Over Young Voters — Here are Five Ways

Mar 18, 2020 - Steve Bannon’s Trojan Horse — How Trump Nearly Brought the Nation to its Knees and How Joe Biden…

Mar 25, 2020 - Bernie Sanders is the Gift that Keeps on Giving. To Trump

Apr 6, 2020 - Why Trump Attacks the Press During Coronavirus Briefings

Apr 14, 2020 - Top Five Reasons We Should not Force Bernie Supporters to Vote for Biden

May 2, 2020 - Cliff Notes for Lazy Journalists — The Tara Reade Allegations

May 11, 2020 - Why I Don’t “Believe” Tara Reade — Because Presumption of Innocence Matters More

May 28, 2020 - What’s Motivating Tara Reade?

Jun 9, 2020 - The New York Times and Others Must Stand up to Twitter — for the Sake of Journalism and Freedom of…

Jun 22, 2020 - Mass Hysteria, Twitter and the Fate of West Side Story

Jul 13, 2020 - Why I Support the Harper’s Letter and Its Signers

Jul 20, 2020 - Can the Former and Never Trump Republicans Save Democrats from Themselves?

Aug 29, 2020 - America in 2020 —  Is it 1972 All Over Again?

Oct 5, 2020 - The Mask Wars: How Crippling Partisanship Slowed Progress

Jan 26, 2021 - A Note to Readers & Perspective Shift