Are you happy as a clam in Clamato?

I don’t stew much. It’s more fun to observe and won­der. Stewing is intense­ly reduc­tive. It’s nec­es­sary for a tasty Ragù alla Bolognese. I am not sure sim­mer­ing helps the human soul.

For the past 24 hours, I have sus­pend­ed my habit of not let­ting only one thought cook in my craw­dad brain to obsess about why in the world we tol­er­ate a major polit­i­cal can­di­date utter­ing the words “she can go to hell.”

If you don’t know what I am talk­ing about, good for you. You have not had the dog poop of the lat­est media cir­cus stick to the soles of your Uggs. If you do know to whom I refer and are hap­py as the minis­cule amount of clam in Clamato, please read more close­ly the ingre­di­ent label of your favorite polit­i­cal candidate.

Recent con­coc­tions of smears, over-ampli­fied racist, misog­y­nis­tic inde­cen­cies about women and oth­ers pros­e­cut­ing this polit­i­cal sea­son are bridges way too far. Therefore, I am allow­ing myself the lux­u­ry of being reduced to an angry editorialist.

The degra­da­tion of pub­lic dis­course has been advanc­ing for decades. As a pro­fes­sion­al PR flak for many years, I had to nego­ti­ate con­tentious pub­lic meet­ings. Always, the goal is con­vinc­ing Group A to con­sid­er the per­spec­tive of Group B and vice ver­sa to achieve mutu­al ben­e­fit. When bold lines are drawn, har­mo­ny becomes dif­fi­cult. Being abject­ly and crude­ly per­son­al is as dishar­mo­nious as a sit­u­a­tion can get.

Once, I con­sult­ed for a major inter­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion that thought it was a good idea to send “suits” down from New York to explain to res­i­dents of a small town the changes the com­pa­ny planned for the sur­round­ing lands they owned. The crowd assem­bled to lis­ten at the local movie the­ater did not ini­tial­ly bring pitch­forks, but angry shouts began when exec­u­tives met dif­fi­cult ques­tions with con­de­scend­ing answers that made no com­mon sense. The gist was not obscure for the mob. More share­hold­er val­ue, less com­mon good.

Today, we live in a world where that kind of ten­sion reg­u­lar­ly receives mete­oric media injec­tions. Expletives have become the zeit­geist of our age. I see things on bumper stick­ers that would have brought out soap for a vig­or­ous mouth-wash­ing not that long ago.

Despite my recent dis­qui­et, I hold on to hope that we may be evolv­ing. Futurist and inven­tor Buckminister Fuller explained, “We are at the point where the integri­ty of the indi­vid­ual counts and not what the polit­i­cal or reli­gious lead­er­ship says to do.”  His argu­ment (in 1983) was that the onrush of world lit­er­a­cy was melt­ing away old par­a­digms and emer­gence of new tech­nolo­gies would free indi­vid­u­als to act in more lov­ing, life-affirm­ing ways.

Both beau­ty and barbs coex­ist in social media chan­nels. There is an unset­tling mix of real­i­ty show, beau­ty pageant, and pro­fes­sion­al wrestling match in the com­ments sec­tion on Facebook. If you hov­er above all that insan­i­ty, what you observe is peo­ple doing lots of squawk­ing and not much lis­ten­ing or thinking.

An intense­ly spir­i­tu­al per­son I know recent­ly offered the fol­low­ing obser­va­tion. “Internet cul­ture has robbed us of sacred silence. For bet­ter or worse, each of us now has a plat­form, a place to vent, to relit­i­gate, to advance our own per­son­al agen­das with­out vet­ting, and with­out respon­si­bil­i­ty. We can be and say any­thing on the inter­net. We can be uni­lat­er­al in our posi­tions, and we don’t have to do the hard work of engag­ing the other.”

Social media can be one of the new tools that Fuller sug­gest­ed will trans­form us. But if we don’t do the hard work of reject­ing invec­tives, life won’t be bet­ter, it will be worse when we become the ugly words we celebrate.