Personal essays
The importance of silliness, humor, and music
The Internet
I fight with the internet every year on the fourth of May.
While so many people celebrate Star Wars Day (for those that don’t know - it’s from the joke “May the Fourth be with you”), for me that day is always tied to the shootings of students at Kent State University by the National Guard.
I’m happy for people to have their fun and enjoy their day - I just want to make sure that, in the process, we don’t lose this important marker.
We need the relief of silliness, humor, and music.
The music. Songs from sixty years ago remind us we’ve been here before.
“What a field day for the heat. A thousand people in the street. Singing songs and carrying signs. Mostly say ‘Hooray for our side’.”
Sixty years later the same darkness descends and I look for silliness, humor, and music.
We can’t spend all day every day horrified and in dark places.
I spend too much of my time doom scrolling.
Maggie, who always seems to know what I need, sent me a completely useless, silly, and just fun gift for Father’s Day that was just what I needed.
She wasn’t telling me the world isn’t falling around us - she was telling me, take a minute outside of it all.
The Guard
This past week was a tough one.
The images of the Ohio National Guard marching onto a college campus is one of the enduring images of my childhood.
I mostly see it in black and white because life, at least on tv and in the newspapers, was in black and white.
I think that even without the four dead students, those images would have stayed with me.
I was ten. Those students were twice my age. Now I think of them as babies. Babies facing other babies - but the other babies carried guns.
Frightened people on both sides with emotions running high. A situation that was escalated when it could have been diffused.
Last week we saw the California National Guard deployed to a small area of Los Angelos.
The act in itself was designed to escalate the situation.
Not only wasn’t the Guard needed. It was explicitly not called out by the Governor. If the Governor decides that the local police can’t handle a situation then he can call out the Guard.
He didn’t.
The protests remained mostly peaceful and certainly contained.
If you’re a president bent on telling the story that Democrats can’t govern and that blue states and cities are hellholes, you need to do something about it.
So the president federalized the California National Guard and sent them in.
Before they arrived, the situation was so peaceful and contained that the President announced that this was the result of the Guard presence.
They weren’t there yet.
Just in case the Guard wasn’t enough, he sent in the Marines as well.
To a US city.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming.”
Aperture
“Wait Daniel,” you say, “the video from Los Angelos looked awful. How can you say it was peaceful and contained.”
I said “mostly peaceful.”
There was enough that if you take a picture at the right moment, pointing your camera in the right way, you see the situation you want to portray.
It was that way Saturday night at the military parade in DC.
I couldn’t watch it.
I couldn’t watch tanks rolling through the streets of our nation’s capitol. I couldn’t watch the robot dogs who will be soon sent in to control us.
But I saw images in some of our top media outlets that made it look like a well-organized well attended event.
That’s the images we saw because that’s where the cameras were pointed at just the right moment.
It was intended to me a military show of force that frightened those of us who might dissent with this government.
The song reminds us that this isn’t new.
“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. Step out of line, the man comes to take you away.”
But then I saw other images.
Images of empty bleachers. Images of sparsely filled lawns. Images of people streaming out as the President began to speak.
Images that reminded us of the silliness of it all.
Sure, there’s a lot of danger there too - but it’s important to not be always afraid.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 273. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe