Last October, I met up in Manhattan with two old friends from summer camp, Nate and Spencer. Retreating at the end of the night to Nate’s apartment, he suggested we watch the DVD our friend Ben had made of our final year at camp, when we were all 14. I joked to Nate that this was my chance to determine whether I could ever run for office. “No, none of us can.”
You’re allowed to shut up
Speak your mind, but maybe not the whole thing all at once.
A group of friends develops a common, empty vernacular. Constant contact breeds so much overlap in experience and reference that a kind of nonsense vocabulary adapts. We have nothing new to tell one another, so we fill the dead space of coexistence with chatter -- a bullshit arsenal to ward off the specter of silence. It’s comfortable, I guess.
No one looked good in this decade-old camp video. We loved to hear ourselves speak, and the opportunity to be on camera elicited an outpouring of absolute waste. We recited the same inside jokes and “Celebrity Jeopardy” quotes, we mocked camp figureheads, and we made fun of each other’s moms. Rarely to attack, but just because we could.
I found plenty of my appearances in the video embarrassing 10 years later, but one moment made me sick. My sneering, brace-faced little self sat at the edge of my bed and, with no prompt whatsoever, declared one of my friends’ moms a “fag,” which neither reflected any real feelings nor made a lick of sense. I said it just to say it. I had a mouth, so I spoke.
Spencer came out as gay not long after we left camp for good. I’d long since hoped that I’d done nothing to make Spencer’s time in the closet more difficult, but the video left no doubt -- there was 14-year-old Seth, who I know meant well, juggling a vicious word in the company of its usual target. It was like watching myself wave a loaded gun around simply because I’d found one.
Watching ourselves a decade later, Spencer insisted I didn’t have to apologize; we’d all participated in the regrettable chatter back then, but that rare glimpse of my past self stuck with me. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody -- I didn’t mean anything -- but I must have. With so much nonsense in the air, something was bound to count to someone. Something idle and unconsidered had an effect.
★★★
Social media, comment sections and forums give us all the tools to publish our words, to broadcast them. I think that’s good. You have the opportunity to speak your mind in a widely accessible space where only a self-selecting few earned that right in the past.
“Speak your mind” is an imperfect slogan, though, because it regards the mind as singular. The mind contains gates -- it observes, conceives, filters and articulates before it speaks. Often, a gate closes before the mind can speak. If this weren’t the case, we’d all be in so much trouble. Soooo much trouble.
I conceive wicked thoughts, and so do you. I conceive thoughts that are wrong, and so do you. I conceive stupid, meaningless thoughts, and so do you. The mind hums constantly. You walk down the street with a din of observation and contemplation in your head, and you mostly keep it there. Because it doesn’t matter, or it’s ignorant, or it’s mean.
No one on the Internet has to know you’re boring or wrong or wicked! Modern technology lubricates the track between conception and indelible publication. You still don’t have to dive in. The First Amendment allows us to speak freely, but it does not compel us to do so.
I put so many words on the Internet that I’m bound to create waste, even poison. But I’ve made a redoubled effort, especially after watching my young self carelessly terrorize one of my best friends, to consider. If not to be a more frugal Internet occupant, then at least to avoid the potential for that sickened feeling after the fact.
Let me apologize to the women and to the VICTIMS of domestic violence people my intent was not to downplay the situation..
— Paul George (@Yg_Trece) September 11, 2014 See More:
