For What Are We Born If Not To Aid One Another?

Or: All Men Are Brothers

A while back—this would have been the summer of 2013—my then-girlfriend (now my wife) and I went down to southern New York to spend a weekend at the farmhouse there that’s been in my mom’s family for something like 150 years. An old house like that always needs work, so we had a checklist of tasks to complete during our stay. One of them involved going to the petting zoo down the road, the owner of which had lived there forever and had told us to come see him if we ever needed tools, to borrow a big stepladder so that I could get onto the roof. I don’t remember the specific job; something to do with clearing debris from in and around the chimney, maybe. The rest of my memories of that weekend have dwarfed the chore itself.

I left Ali at the farmhouse for what should have been at most a twenty-minute errand: drive the two or three miles to the petting zoo, introduce myself and make nice, load up the ladder, drive back. I didn’t even take my phone with me. At that quaint period in the distant past, during Obama’s second term, there was no cell reception in the Chemung Valley.

The trip ended up taking more than two hours, because my pathological inability to extricate myself from awkward situations meant that an offer of a root beer before I took the ladder back to the farmhouse led to me and the owner, who I’ll call “Max,” hanging out in the toolshed while we each drank one, during which time he put on an InfoWars DVD illuminating several conspiracies involving the predilections and secret influences behind various political figures, CNN contributors, and so on.¹

In my defense I had not yet even laid eyes on the ladder at this point, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my mission and therefore the structural integrity of the farmhouse roof. So I participated in an interminable stretch of conversation—during regular pauses in the video to break down what we’d just seen—to which my only contributions were “wow” and “that’s wild.” Eventually the DVD ended, and Max delivered his own pet theory: that the cultural wave of zombie movies and TV shows we were experiencing at that time was being funded and pushed by the federal government to help prime the population for civil wars waged over dwindling resources. To train us to see our neighbors as mindless, as less than human, and so be more able to kill them at a moment’s notice.

To be clear I don’t think the government or Hollywood astroturfed that particular moment for that particular reason. But I do find myself thinking of that conversation with Max a lot, because I do think we got there anyway, or are at least getting there.

It can be hard to talk about this stuff without coming off like a crank. This crazy guy I met showing me an Alex Jones video in his toolshed incidentally raises an interesting point is hardly a convincing starter, I know. But I find it hard to ignore the fact that the social contract doesn’t just seem to be crumbling, it seems to be imploding.² We will at some point need to come to terms with the fact that the terrain is changing, and that the kids aren’t alright, and neither are the adults, a rapidly increasing majority of whom seem to be socially and emotionally FUBAR.³

I think about TikTok, and the ways it is making young women so unreasonably paranoid about becoming victims of human trafficking that it is helping dismantle all notions of community, solidarity, and what we might owe to one another.

Last week, @JanelleandKate, a page that typically posts pranks and skits, uploaded a TikTok compilation of signs that you are being targeted, like zip ties on your door handles, money in your windshield, and misplaced shopping carts when walking to your car. “If you see this, run,” the creator said at the start of the video. She even suggested that someone could be hiding under your car, waiting to cut your Achilles heel to slow you down. Is it supposed to be a prank or practical advice? None of the suggestions really feel like realistic obstructions to watch out for, but as a viewer you don’t always know a creator’s intent. “As women, you need to be aware of your surroundings,” she said. The video, which also uses the hashtags #women and #blonde, has over 10 million views.

White suburban paranoia is nothing new, obviously, but like everything else nasty about this world it is accelerating at breakneck speed. (To wit: violent crime is reaching historic lows in this country, but people tend to think it’s on the rise. This incongruity, coupled with the extreme rise in income inequality and housing prices leading to an epidemic of visible homelessness, has accelerated people’s desire to fortify their own castles and cut whatever tattered threads remained of the social contract.)

I think about how bad the roads have gotten since the start of COVID. It feels like I’m really taking my life into my hands every time I get behind the wheel, which has always literally been true but is becoming increasingly more apparent, and more dire. This is not just a gut feeling: a number of studies from entities like the NIH and AAA bear out the truth that Americans are driving more distractedly and more aggressively since March of 2020, for a whole host of reasons. Relatedly, I’ve been biking a lot more places lately, one of the joys of moving to such a flat state. It’s scary: one night you go to bed as Calvin and wake up the next morning as Calvin’s dad, without so much as a warning.

Coming home from a gathering one night last week, three of us were riding a half-mile home on a road without a dedicated bike lane, doing our best to hug the right side of the street. We still managed to have a woman roll down her window, blast around us going at least 15 mph over the limit in a residential area, and scream “GET OUT OF THE FUCKING ROAD!” on her way past (which also included blowing through a light that had clearly changed to red).

I’ve compared notes with many other friends who regularly bike in the cities where they live and this is a terrifyingly common experience. I don’t know what it is about the American brain that gets so enraged by the existence of a two-wheeled vehicle, but every single person I’ve asked has had numerous experiences just like this one. It happens to some people once a week. It’s hard not to feel like we are absolutely cooked as a society, but the plausible “safe” alternative here is to become part of the problem myself, so I’m just going to keep biking.

This is all to say that the structural and economic changes needed in order to start repairing this problem at the most basic level do not appear to be in the immediate plans of anyone with any actual decision-making power in this country. So absent the massive state intervention and investment required to fund housing, healthcare, education, and environmental protection, it falls upon us to fight back how we can against those forces destroying society at the most basic level. This includes resisting the full-court press designed to make you hate and fear your neighbor, the immigrant, the refugee, the homeless, the queer, you name it. You have to practice believing, in your heart of hearts, that all men are brothers, and then translating that belief into action every time you get behind the wheel of a car, or an empty palm is extended to you from a dingy streetcorner, or someone you care about (who only leaves their tacky McMansion in a climate-controlled truck larger than the ones we fight wars in to go to Target) tells you they’ve never been more unsafe as a person. You have to resist, if you spend time participating in online discourse, the idea that other people lack interiority, which is becoming an alarmingly trendy position. You have to resist the temptation to let other people’s hatred and fear catalyze your own. You have to remember what Pilar asked in For Whom the Bell Tolls: For what are we born if not to aid one another?

Take care of yourself out there, and take care of everyone else, too. Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. I now counter with my own conspiracy, which is that entities like InfoWars are themselves “false flag” operations to make regular people scoff at all notions of conspiracy, thereby congratulating themselves for not believing in the real, current implications of true stories like COINTELPRO, The Phoenix Program, the CIA taking out JFK, and so on. (I will join with the skeptics in saying that David Gergen is almost certainly not an alien lizard wearing human skin.)

2. A controlled demolition??? Investigate!

3. I was gonna say “young people, look this acronym up,” but when I tried doing so all the top results were for a Netflix original movie by the same name. Another Hollywood psyop?