Bankrolling the bilious simply beggars belief

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/09/2024 (387 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There comes a reckoning.

The power went out at work, and I went home to write this as a thunderstorm came cracking down over Winnipeg, the rain overcoming the gutters in sheets, the cat looking out the porch door at the downpour and then back at me as if I were to blame.

I had intended to write about Free Day, or, more accurately, the day after Free Day, when all that is left in front yards and on boulevards are the things absolutely no one wanted to take.

What’s it like to be an iron, soaked in early Monday rain and almost certainly ruined? Or a paperback Jack Higgins novel, soaked through and splayed to show pages 120 and 121 to the sky? A sweater, rejected by all, splayed out, arms akimbo, as the horizon lights up to the east with purple cloud?

I’m a slow starter, so I didn’t get that column written. At least, I didn’t get it written in time.

Instead, I did the other part of my job, keeping up on news and on social media, dipping my nets to see if I could drag up new topics for Free Press editorials.

I wish I hadn’t.

Some of my family are still in Newfoundland, and I follow the news there almost like muscle memory: I know the players, and the play.

And one of the things I follow, not just in Newfoundland and Labrador, but in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, too, is the RCMP.

In Newfoundland, the RCMP were looking for a white 2014 Nissan Sentra and the person who had stolen it from the town of Marystown. So far, so good. Then, they put out a social media message saying they’d identified a suspect, and that they had arrested him. So far, even better.

Social media done right. But I scrolled too far.

The next message had a video of Justin Trudeau, and the message, “How about theft of billions? Crickets. Do your jobs. Arrest this scumbag.”

Another day, another bilious excretion that adds no value or purpose to anything.

There is value in some bile: ambergris, produced in sperm whale bile ducts for reasons unclear, is valued by perfumers and therefore sells for a heady price. Internet bile? Well, word is there are now some who are being paid for their performance — but that just means it has price, not worth.

I don’t care if it’s coming from Russia or some angry web denizen who feels they’ve never gotten their due, or even from federal MPs who think we pay them massive salaries to act like any other childish internet troll.

All I want is for it to stop popping up everywhere, on anything from recipes to birthday greetings, as if (excuse me for this ) pissing on anything good is the recipe for making flowers grow.

And it’s much worse now than it’s ever been. Calling it an echo chamber doesn’t do it justice: an echo chamber bounces sound back to you, a little diminished with every pass as the sounds waves lose their power. On the internet, loud is answered with louder, nasty with nastier, offensive with over-the-top offensive. Who knew we were surrounded by so many people with truly ugly souls?

Who knew a tool claiming to give everyone an equal voice would actually end up being dominated by those who yell the most or the loudest, or who use the technology to ensure their own equal voice is the one heard the most broadly?

The upshot for me of that latest bitter missive to the RCMP?

Well, let’s just say beauty flees easily.

Instead of finding some small wonder in the world, looking to the unfolding treasure of people sharing what they have, to trash becoming treasure, I’m led instead to shrug.

To say “who cares?”

Writing about wonder is restorative: it lifts me, and I hope it lifts others, too.

But the bug that bit me through my phone today has dark poison.

It does damage: it does damage to all of us.

If you’re among the lucky who don’t spend any part of your day looking into the techno abyss, I envy you. If you are in a position to decide to put down the endless time-wasting hate, I envy you, and I’d recommend you do it.

Me? It’s part of my job.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t need a reset.

So I’ll down tools someday in the next month or so for a week to head somewhere where internet signals are few and far between, where I can compare spruce to fir to tamarack, split cut birch and see the stars in the near-perfect dark.

I think I’m going to aim for the week before the U.S. federal election, when everything should be at peak tizzy.

And I hope it will draw some of this darkness out of my veins, and maybe give me renewed strength to shrug the rest of it off.

There comes a reckoning. For us all.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca