Echo Chamber

 IN all honesty, part of me is amazed that human civilization has made it this far. Fall 2020. It's an election year - have you heard? Natural disasters abound - have you breathed the smoke, maybe your feet are wet if you live in Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. People I used to consider very good friends - or the closest of relatives - are now at the bottom of my secret pile of hidden-and-avoided Facebook friends. My dirty little secret. I've even unfriended a few people that I now wish I hadn't simply because they were expressing views that I didn't like. Maybe they shared a racist meme about Beyonce or were a little too strokey about their gun-fetish-as-sexual orientation. Look at me - I'm a judgmental person. How did this come to pass? I used to hold onto a diverse group of people in my life without digging in too deep about what their political stance or religious views were. I just liked them as people. Maybe I bought weed from them or went to grade school or played in band with them. Whatever was in their head was not the whole of who they were as a person and if I liked you, I liked you. But I've fallen prey to the divisiveness that so many others have - if you're not in my echo chamber, how could I be friends with you?

IN the early 2000s I like everyone else experienced the 9/11 attacks on that strange and fateful day. I was driving the produce truck in the very early hours of the morning through southern Oregon on I 5, on my way to deliver to Ashland and Medford accounts and then hitting a few farms to pick up palletized organic produce on the return trip to Eugene. Always a brutal-long day was this drive, starting about midnight and ending about 4pm - at the time legal but I believe the drive-time hours are a bit tighter in recent years.  South of Roseburg, my truck would lose all radio reception until I got over a few hills to Grants Pass, where I would pick up the NPR station for the morning news out of habit. I was stunned when I started tuning in to a staticky report about the attacks. It was hot information, coming fast - a plane had hit the trade center - no, two planes. They were on fire - more static. The aggrieved reporter was just about yelling. I hadn't heard anything like this except in old movies about Pearl Harbor or World War II. ".... the tower ... is coming down ... oh my God," the voice went along. The tower? My mind tried to get around it - was he talking about the antennae on top of the building? That didn't make any sense nor did it seem that dramatic. What was the big deal? I was about to find out as the day progressed. 

On the return trip north, I went by Brightside farm to pick up cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplant from my late friend Robert Jardeen, a notorious farmer who happened to be a wee bit of an alcoholic. As I pulled the semi in to his packing shed and got out to load the pallets, he shoved a beer into my hand. "We're going to join the army and fuck up Al Quaeda! Goddamn Osama Bin Ladin!" Of course, I couldn't drink the beer but I went into the shed where he and his buddies were watching the event on a very staticky television set. There I saw for the first time what the fuck was truly happening. Oh my god. I couldn't get my head around it. We all know now - it was a shocking day. 

Fast forward a few years and this surreal event was still stewing in my head - how could the US allow this to happen? The question burned constantly With the advent of youtube - we know where this is heading - I fell down the rabbit hole of 9/11 conspiracy theories. It all made sense. An event of this magnitude couldn't happen to the most well-militarized, well-protected country - city even - on the planet. The US government had to have an invisible hand in this, guiding things along, allowing those planes to make that triple direct hit. Part of me still believes this, although I've tried to quash this unprovable theory in my own mind. It's how my brain makes sense of an unfathomable event. But it can't be proven true, and the evidence no longer exists for a proper investigation.  Whatever the cause, the result is the same - lives were lost; political hawks had a heyday with the opportunity to further invade the middle east and Afghanistan - even though that didn't make any sense to those of us with opposing views. The hawks had the zeitgeist , they had the football and ran with it. Regardless of whether or not 9/11 was a conspiracy, it was both a tragedy and an opportunity. 

The recent fires that swept through all the west coast states were undeniably horrible. There was no benefit to any of us from the fires - 1.5 million acres and counting lost in Oregon and Washington, an incomprehensible amount. The fires had been preceded and stoked by the ultimate wind storm, the likes the Northwest almost never sees in a dry September, blowing from the east towards the sea with gusts of 50-60 mph.  On any average year there are several fires in our neck of the woods and it can become very smoky. 2020 felt different, if nothing else just because of the sheer magnitude and abundance of fires - from Southern California all the way to the Canadian border. Instantly, conspiracies started popping up on Facebook and other social sites. I understood why. Despite the obvious cause - to me anyway - that these fires were stoked by an unusual wind storm coming on the heels of the hottest summer on record, where all the timber and brush was ready to ignite with the slightest spark, I saw some other folks posting the various theories that "antifa" and Black Lives Matter instigators were starting these blazes - " how could this be possible otherwise? The entire west coast is on fire!" I understand how people fall for these easy but incorrect answers - I'm guilty of jumping to conclusions at times also. 

I started this blog in the middle of the night - having trouble sleeping these days - how about you? I was having one of those late-night moments of clarity, an epiphany that I shouldn't discount my friends that don't share my typical bleeding-heart liberal/leftist views because I might not understand the circumstances that brought them to their understanding of the world and how things work. In my half-sleep state, I vowed to myself to stop hiding from those that I disagree with and just try talking to them a little more openly and without judgement.  I've already tried hiding under a rock. I don't want to do that anymore.