Outrage Machine

 Last week over on my other blog, I wrote yet another scathing denunciation of the Trump administration's policy of kidnapping innocent people and deporting them to indefinite confinement at the hands of El Salvador's dictator. 

I asked a friend what he thought of the piece. He said he had seen it flash across his inbox—but had immediately archived it. "Not for me," he had thought. The angry tone was not his jam. "It's too much a part of the social media outrage machine." 

No wonder the piece did numbers on Bluesky. 

To which I say—look, I too wish I didn't have to be outraged. Outrage is not a good feeling. I just spent a week on a road trip listening to the new Ezra Klein book. I'd rather be spending my time with that—fantasizing about high-speed rail and the wonders of the future too. 

But then, I complete the road trip and open the news. And I see that on a bridge I had just passed on my drive in Buffalo, an innocent person recently made a wrong turn and ended up spending three weeks in ICE detention for it. 

I read, in the article, that another man took a wrong turn on a different bridge and ended up in a Salvadoran dungeon for it—an innocent man, who was lawfully seeking asylum and had just been approved for a work permit. 

He had just been driving for his delivery job—bringing a McDonalds meal to some hungry citizen. He took a wrong turn in Michigan, accidentally drove into Canada, and ended up sent to be tortured and jailed incommunicado in a Salvadoran gulag—possibly for the rest of his life. 

That's happening in this country. Now. That's the nightmare we are living in. 

So how can I drop out of the "outrage culture" if what our government is doing to people is truly an outrage? What if outrage is truly the only legitimate response? 

"I too would like to be wise," as Brecht once put it—"To shun the strife of the world and to live out / Your brief time without fear." I too no longer want to be outraged. I want to spend my time finding Klein-style solutions to real problems—like housing shortages and transportation. 

But—"All this I cannot do," as Brecht went on. "Truly, I live in dark times." Times when "a talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors." (Willett/Manheim/Fried trans. throughout)

I know that outrage is a bad look. I know the constant "outrage machine" and toxic negativity of social media are bad for the soul. Brecht knew this too: "Hatred, even of meanness / Contorts the features. / Anger, even against injustice / Makes the voice hoarse."

Brecht's point was that the outrage machine of the present is trying to make possible a world where outrage is no longer necessary—where people can enjoy their lives in peace and work out rational solutions to solvable problems—housing, health care, education. 

But that's not the world I live in now. I—as Brecht put it—happen to "live in dark times."

To those born later—Brecht said—the ones fortunate enough to inherit a world where outrage was no longer the appropriate or necessary response—all he asked is that they take a moment to consider the kinds of times we lived in, and "think of us with forbearance." 

You may find the discourse we engaged in on social media—the outrage, the fury—to be toxic and relentlessly negative in retrospect. But please: "Remember / When you speak of our failings / The dark time too / Which you have escaped."