Friendly reminder that social media is the primary means that a lot of people have of experiencing this off the map horrifying moment on a social level. Not everyone Zooms it up, or does so frequently.

Also, a lot of people who frequently have in-person interactions thru their jobs, or for other essential reasons, do not primarily socialize that way, if they socialize that way at all. Basically, some people are socially swimming in what we are collectively posting & tweeting.

I think if we could all try to be about 10% kinder, or even 20% kinder, recognizing that a whole lot of people are simultaneously experiencing a disaster so large that our minds can barely make meaning of it, I think we might gain some ground on how we handle this together.

That may sound hyper obvious and trite but it clearly, clearly isn't.

You cannot mix the usual level of angst, acrimony and impatience of these internet streets with this disaster and expect anything but an angry, fractured and alienated response to this.

The traumatic, desensitizing bombardment of bad news people experience, via the 24 hour news cycle, is hurting our ability to respond to this. The way that people interact on social media is hurting our ability to respond to this.

We all need to get right with that reality, myself included. I can't give you a blue print except to say that we should all be practicing patience when possible, and that means, some of the time, that patience won't come naturally.

We'll have to be on the look out for when it should be practiced and try to be disciplined about it. There is no perfection to be found. But practice gets us farther than not practicing. I think compassion and combatting cynicism function much the same way.

We want to think of our politics as being concurrent with our personalities, so that they are a reflection of who we are inside -- a good person measuring stick -- as opposed to being a reflection of what we have come to *do*, believe and, perhaps most foundationally, understand.

We want to see politics as summaries of other people. This is not to say we owe our hopes to those whose ideologies are at odds with our existence. It does mean that these things will be sometimes be required of us when they are not concurrent with our feelings.

We need to have discernment about when that's happening. Because it will continue to come up for many of us. And this all applies to me as much as any of you btw.