POPCORN

I am in that loop between Thanksgiving and Christmas, trying very hard to be merry if not joyful, and I am for the most part. Still, it ain’t easy. I avoid news media with a sense of purpose. I don’t know much of anything that comes from talking heads or headlines that pass for news. If not depressing then certainly disturbing or worrisome; not a dooms day thing but like fatty meat, hard to digest.

When I was teaching school there was a one-word expression that described a particular type of ‘out of control’ classroom. It went like this: one kid (K1) does something disruptive that requires teacher (T) attention. Normal activity stops. With that break in the flow of instruction (T) gives undivided attention to the perpetrator. Whether they think about it or not, other students seize the moment. (K2) on the other side of the room, out of the line of sight, blurts out something intended to draw a response. If (T) doesn’t respond to (K2), everybody starts talking. (K3) who is triangulated away from (K1 & K2) screams, knowing that (T) won’t know for sure who screamed. If (T) doesn’t disengage with (K1) in an attempt to restore order in the room, it goes from a simple ‘Ping’ to zoo-chaos in 15 seconds or less. The word is “Popcorn”. In the lounge or in a meeting it was common to hear an adult confess, “Yeah, they went Popcorn on me this morning.” Everybody had their own way of counteracting Popcorn, some better than others but you had to have a plan. Even if you go nuts, act crazy, you become the center of attention, gain some control, do your job. That was my strategy. 

The news: on the local scene it’s all bad, or nearly all bad. Sometimes a sports star does something for poor or sick kids. Sometimes the police have an uplifting encounter with ordinary people or a new company brings jobs to the city. In national news, very little good news. It feels like the Popcorn effect on a global scale. When one bully-leader burns the house down and has his critics murdered, his neighbor, the bully across the border feels empowered to do something even worse, and so on: Popcorn. 

If the bully-leader is a narcissist demagogue, like the Donald, then his indiscretions go viral. Other wanna-be Donald autocrats model his self obsessed, bad behavior. In congress you get Popcorn, with partisan-tribal obsession between competing political interests. Out of that we now have Fake News and pushback against any and everything that doesn’t satisfy competing partisan whims. In a classroom where I am the biggest kid I wield at least some influence but when I step outside my door I’m just another kernel of unpopped corn. So I’m taking the coward’s way out. I’m not going to pop at all. I don’t need to know all the dirt or listen to any of the propaganda. Good music or educational programs are entertaining and even better, they digest without the gas pains.

My own personal ideology, if taken to its other end will offend or annoy typical citizens. Simply stated, I think we do well enough for high functioning monkeys. At the core of our dilemma, we are conflicted between an instinctive need to throw poop and take what doesn’t belong to us and biological/anthropological limitations that make us interdependent; we need each other. I guess that makes us narcissistic altruists, an oxymoron but what the heck, looking too hard, too long in the mirror isn’t very rewarding, neither is watching the news.