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This past week, in between all the business and parenting to do lists, I was thinking about cultural fluency. I first thought about it weeks ago when a pair of presidential nominees both decided to write Op-Ed columns aimed at Utah and Mormons in particular. As a Utah-based Mormon person, they were both attempting to speak to me. One definitely came across as an outsider, not quite comprehending what is important to this demographic and why it matters to us. The other had a piece that sounded as if it had been written by someone who was raised as a Mormon. It not only hit the exact emotional notes that would appeal, it also used all the jargon words correctly. After reading the piece I had to stop and think about whether I was impressed that the candidate took the time to hire someone who was completely culturally fluent, or if I felt it was a little disingenuous for the candidate to pretend to a fluency they do not actually have. I still haven’t decided.

Reading the pieces brought to my attention, in a way I hadn’t seen before, that culture is subtle and extremely nuanced. My sister once commented that sometimes she is instantly comfortable with a person she just met. Usually she discovers that this person spent childhood or early adult years in California, Utah, Idaho, or Arizona. As a person who has lived abroad, she found that fascinating. She eventually decided that the difference is in the small things, the turn of phrase, how close the person stands, the way they accept or decline an offer, all the tiny social contracts that vary from region to region even when all the regions speak the same language. It is strange for me to realize that as I move through the world I am automatically behaving in ways that will make some people more comfortable with me and others less so.

I thought about this again when I watched the first episode of a show called Quantico. It was about new recruits in the FBI training program. I was surprised to see one of the recruits being a Mormon, returned missionary from Salt Lake City, Utah. It makes sense I guess. The FBI does heavy recruiting in Utah because the clean living which Mormons impose on themselves make them less susceptible to certain methods of corruption. This was even mentioned in the show. Once I got over my surprise, I was quite curious to see how the show would handle this Mormon character. Would they do enough research? Would this character be written with cultural fluency or would I be left thinking “No Mormon would do that.” I didn’t get a chance to see. The Mormon character died before the end of the first episode in a very abrupt way. It was like the show writers wanted to acknowledge the Mormon/FBI thing, but they didn’t want to actually have to deal with getting a Mormon character right.

We learn so much about how the world works from social context. It is the kids around us in school that teach us what is acceptable and what is not. Often these lessons are unpleasant because humans can be cruel to those who make them uncomfortable by being different. Social context is in our entertainment as well, which is why it is unfortunate that so much of it is generic culture. So much entertainment assumes that most audiences will identify with characters who are white, medium to college educated, not particularly religious, and middle class. The thing is, that person isn’t actually neutral. The culture we see on TV is a fiction that is lacking specific cultural fluency. In some ways this is the creators of shows playing it safe. If they have their characters inhabit a generic American culture, then they won’t get angry emails from people telling them what cultural mistakes they made. I know that any time I see a Mormon character on the screen, I pay close attention to see if that character is mis-representing my people. I don’t get to pay that attention very often.

I was also thinking about how social culture is created. I used an example of the things school kids teach to each other. There are so many cultural things which schools and educators assume their students will learn at home or pick up automatically. Social skills and life skills aren’t explicitly taught. We’re expected to learn them by observing and living around other people. Except this leaves every single one of us with gaps in our knowledge. I see this with my kids all the time. School teaches them how to take turns on the playground and expects them to extrapolate that into adults who know how to take turns in a conversation. Except being socially fluent is so much more nuanced than taking turns for a slide. I wonder how a focus on social education would change the incidences of bullying inside a school.

I don’t really have any conclusion for all these loose thoughts other than to say that how people interact with their cultures is fascinating. There is so much nuance and I’m really glad that I live in a world where nuances and differences exist.

Sometimes in my wanderings around the internet I happen across contentious posts and comment sections. I do my best to not participate in these, as does Howard, because participating in contention punches our anxiety buttons and can interfere with our ability to work for days. But sometimes, when I’m not directly involved, I dig in and read the post and the reactions. It is an effort on my part to understand this behavior and why we all get pulled into it at some point. I figure if I can learn from the interactions when I’m not involved, then I’ll be better able to either make my points or disengage when I am involved.

One pattern that I notice is one person choosing to wrestle publicly with complicated and emotionally charged thoughts on an issue and then the comments get dog piled with anger and vitriol most of which doesn’t really address the actual words of the original poster. Instead the commenters project motivations onto the poster based on some assumption or belief in the commenter’s head. Often it feels to me like the commenters are responding more to a dozen conversations and situations which happened before this exchange, rather than to the actual ideas expressed in the post.

The other thing I notice is that most of the time people are not actually attempting to convince other people that their position is right. They think they are, but nothing in their words invites consensus. They instead trigger defensiveness because the person feels attacked. These arguments are far more about venting feelings than about changing minds. Hint: if your comment includes the word Idiot (or any other name calling word) then you are venting feelings. We all need to vent. Sometimes we can’t see what our thoughts are until we see them written or say them out loud. Sometimes we can’t clear our head of assumptions until we’ve spoken ignorantly. Yet on the internet all words tend to be treated like we are planting a flag, claiming territory, declaring which side of the issue we are on. As if people won’t alter their thoughts as a political (or emotional) situation evolves.

It is simple psychology that if a person has to defend their thought from attack, they’re more likely to cling to it rather than let it go. Which means attacking someone for being wrong is the least likely method of convincing someone of their wrongness. I think we all forget this on occasion, particularly when we’re in the grip of emotional reaction or a need to vent those emotions. Politics are huge, like forces of nature, and an individual can feel powerless in the face of them. Being powerless is terrifying, being angry takes a sliver of power back from fear, and it is easier to be angry at someone specific because a person is comprehensible. We might win in a conflict with another person. So people become the scapegoats for our fear-driven anger at something large and uncontrollable.

I try to remember this when I see angry responses. I try to look on the angry person with eyes of compassion and send a prayer that they can be less afraid. This is much harder to do if the anger is aimed at me or mine. I have to find an appropriate balance between defense against actual harm, disengaging, de-escalating, and compassion. This compassion is also hard when I am the angry person. I have to pause and figure out why I am angry, what about this particular incident set me off, whether I’m actually angry with the person in front of me or if I’m angry about something else and tempted to land it all on the person who is in reach. On good days I am able to dig even deeper and find the fear which is driving the anger.

I write to sort these things out. I’m much better able to sort out my thoughts on a contentious topic if I don’t have to defend every thought as I pass through it, so most of my political thoughts do not get posted publicly. I have them. Many of them. I have a host of attached anxieties as well. Howard and I habitually talk about events on the world stage or about smaller conflicts in our various communities. Of late the kids have been listening and adding thoughts of their own. So much is shifting around right now and they are trying to figure out what to think and feel about it. Somewhere in the future we’ll figure out which of the myriad predictions was accurate. For now it is all nebulous and scary. Which is why so many people are angry and so ready to attack each other. I wish I could give the entire world a hug and say “It’ll be okay.” Except I can’t say that truthfully. One person’s “okay” is another person’s “terrible”. No matter how things turn out, some people will be rightfully angry about it.

Keeping political thoughts off the internet seems wise as an anxiety management strategy. Yet there are times where I can’t clear a thought from my head until I’ve spoken it out loud. Sometimes this means posting it publicly where it is open to being attacked. This post was one of those. I argued with myself about it, because I know it doesn’t add anything particularly new to the discourse. I also know that in the writing I’ve probably made errant assumptions or false connections. I kind of want to put a footnote on everything I post online saying “All opinions are subject to change, without notice, upon receipt of further information.” Posting is scary, but if I don’t post, then it clogs up my brain, using up creative circuits that I need for other projects. Sometimes we need to speak up because we want to advocate for change in the world. Other times we need to speak up so we can clear our head for new thoughts.

I wish I had a nice wrapped up conclusion for these thoughts, but they’re still evolving. Most of my thoughts are, which is why I will be trying to give space to the thoughts of others without attacking them, so that they can evolve too.

I read The Crucible in high school. I might even have read it the same year that I read Lord of the Flies. I remember the teacher leading us carefully through discussions of mob justice and leadership through popularity. We, earnest honors students that we were, all spoke solemnly about how terrible it was to have people convicted and punished based on the voice of the crowd. It was a different year when I read The Scarlet Letter and learned about the pillory, a place of public shaming for sinners. I remember thinking how glad I was to not live in a place where mob justice and public shaming were normal.

In history class I learned about civil rights and why people must speak out. I learned about oppressed people who refused to obey laws that they felt were wrong. By doing so, they required that the oppression become physical and public instead of social and quiet. This forced those in power to confront their own behavior. And by “those in power” I’m talking about all the people who didn’t have lesser status under “Separate But Equal” and Jim Crow laws.

These days I look at the news and see inequality. I see people getting lighter sentences than seems fair for the damage they caused. I see others ending up dead for small infractions or no infractions at all. I notice that there is a correlation between skin color and severity of punishment and a similar correlation tied to social class. Our justice system fails. Often. It is difficult to create a system that is truly equitable when all of the people in it are imperfect at best, and biased at worst. Yet there is something lovely in what the founders of my country attempted. Instead of judgement from on high, there is a small group of flawed people who try their hardest to be impartial as they examine evidence. And they are instructed “innocent until proven guilty.” That ideal is not always applied, but it is supposed to be there.

This is why I am sad, scared, and worried any time I see a hue and cry on the internet. I see faces and crimes published. I see people gathering in crowds to throw virtual stones because someone else cried “sinner!” I’ve read accounts where a person loses their income and has to physically relocate to escape harassment, all because of an ill-considered tweet. I saw when parents were tried in the court of public opinion because somehow their parenting decisions ended up on the news. I know that, historically, handling things quietly was how oppression lasted so long. But most of the time nothing is made better by a mob. There is a world of difference between calling out an elected official because of bad behavior, and a thousand people posting hateful messages on the Facebook wall of a private individual.

The thing that concerns me most about internet mobs (which can turn into physical mobs) is there is no pause. People are angry and they feel something must be done NOW. They know that the justice system is slow and sometimes inadequate, so they feel they must do something themselves. They, or rather we, I am not innocent of this. No one is who has ever been angry on the internet. We latch on to the first action we can think of which vents feelings and feels relevant. This is usually public shaming. So few people pause to think: “Is it my job to judge this individual case?” “What am I really angry at?” “What actions will really solve this injustice I am angry about?” Instead of anger applied to concerted effort for systemic change, the internet hoists up an example. A supposed perpetrator is displayed in public like the pillory, or heads on a pike, or the thief dying in the crow cage. The example sates the anger for a while, and most everyone goes back to what they were doing before. The system rolls on unchanged.

We need fewer mobs and more resolute anger. There are absolutely things that are deserving of anger. And sometimes an example is a useful lever for social change, but most often this is the case when the example is selected by due process or at least careful research and gathering of evidence. Resolute anger is smart and patient. It is loud and unruly when that is necessary in defense of the oppressd. But more often it acts firmly, quietly, carefully to change the very social structures that support injustice. It acts within the systems whenever possible, because the intent is to make the rules better, not to create lawlessness. And when the systems are completely hostile, civil disobedience comes before rioting. None of this bears much resemblance to clicking “share” to someone else’s angry post without looking into the issue yourself. If you’re going to be angry about something, be angry enough to do research. Be angry enough to donate to organizations that you feel are actually working to solve the problem. Be angry enough to start an organization if you can’t find one. Be angry enough to do more than write a sentence or a paragraph. And if you aren’t angry enough to put in this much effort, maybe you should turn your attention to things that matter to you more instead of just adding to the sound and fury which signifies nothing.