The Inherent Tone-Deafness of “Now more than ever before…”
Over the course of 2020, I sat down many times and started to bang-out an opinion piece exploring a variety of topics that comprised the rich batshittery of the year. Nary a day went by when there wasn’t some headline or talking point that didn’t inspire a rant of some depth or intellectual magnitude. Of all these pieces, I published a grand total of none. Zero. Not one. Nothing I wrote seemed to capture the full essence of the dumpster fire that was 2020. At no point did I feel like what I had to say, no point of view I could present was worth voicing to the masses. The shouting crowd didn’t need one more bloviator going hoarse, trying to repeat what was already said or said better. So I said very little. No articles, no essays, no meaningful tweets.
Not saying anything during most of the year, left me to listen. It left me to hear. December 30, 2020 — the date is important because it tells you just how close I got to finishing the year before I realized what I was listening for — I was driving to work early in the morning. I usually listen to NPR that early because — yes, I know this is ironic — I dislike morning radio talk shows. The smattering of good music wedged between inane chatter, stupid telephone pranks, and unintelligent quizzes isn’t enough to keep me entertained during my twenty-two minute commute. So, I opt for news updates that might actually teach or entertain for a few minutes.
On that particular morning, the local station was doing a short, two-day fundraising drive as they often do periodically throughout the year. It was during one of their two-minute pleadings that one of the broadcasters iterated a phrase that I know I have heard a thousand times or more before over the last year. I hadn’t really paid attention to it before. A repeated whisper that whiffed past my ear during a light breeze, the phrase just hadn’t hit me in the face yet.
“Now more than ever before…”
We’ve all heard it. We may not have paid much attention to it or more likely, we have dismissed it because typically what follows those introductory words pierces our ears or our hearts reminding us how we have been wounded by this year. What we fail to realize is the falsity of “now more than ever before…”. It is precisely the reminder that WE have been wounded that makes this statement so incredibly tone-deaf and ignorant.
“Now more than ever before…” implies that whatever follows that phrase is worse now than it has ever been in recorded history or more specifically, more than in recent memory.
The idea that we are living in “unprecedented” times is fallacious. The truth of the matter is, that basically nothing that follows five words is truly “worse” than before. Everything we have experienced in the last year has been done before. We are living through, what boils down to, a series of postmodern crises. The difference — the ONLY difference — between then and now is how these crises have affected us. More specifically, how they have personally affected each of us individually.
Most of the newsworthy stories of what happens in the world, society, eras, or elsewhere happens to someone else. We see it on a screen and think to ourselves, “isn’t that a shame,” and promptly push it out of our minds. Most everyone at some point in their life will experience a tragedy, trauma, or crisis of some form or another that may upset our lives for a brief time, but we get past it. Those who wrestle with degrees of depression may battle more than others, but even still, trouble finds all of us eventually. For some, trouble is a part of everyday life; so much so, they become numb to its effects. We aren’t being murdered at the hands of police at the same rate as others. We don’t fret about clean drinking water from our taps, whether or not we have food on our tables, or that we even have a roof over our heads to the same degree as we hear in the news. We don’t worry about our job security or income that pays our bills like those living on government assistance year-in and year-out. The stark reality is that what we see on the news is happening to other people — real people.
“Now more than ever before…” is a signpost that says, “we recognize YOU are NOW being affected by the donkey-kicks of life”.
To put it more plainly, these five words are an acknowledgment that those of us in ordinary middle-class, suburban America are now feeling the devastating effects of things we only have seen on the news before now.
We are not living in unprecedented times. 2020 brought everything home. And I mean everything. Politics. Racism. Sexism. Global health issues in the form of a pandemic. We’ve dealt with job loss, hunger, and the threat of homelessness. We have come to blows — literally — over freedoms of choices, individual rights, being able to vote, and even just dining out with family or friends. Debates over lockdowns and doing what is best to protect human life have resulted in push backs that have violated law and increased a death rate far beyond what it could have been had we not been so self-important and devoid of common sense.
“Now more than ever before”, we have all bore direct and repeated witness to the plight of the African American community in the United States. Even in the face of a pandemic, nightly protests in cities across the country have kept the voices of the black community not only elevated but amplified. This is not the first time this has happened. The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s is not so far in the past that most of us do not remember it. In fact, we lost many of the loudest voices of that era in 2020 alone. The fight for racial equality didn’t end when Lyndon Johnson signed those Acts. The fights didn’t end at all. But the voices were drowned out by other crises. Racism didn’t die out or even go away. It just festered, untreated.
“Now more than ever before”, more of us are at risk of losing individual freedoms and rights we never expected could ever be lost. The conservative right who have for decades blustered the “right to life” movement is the same group decrying the exponentially mounting death toll to a health crisis they call a hoax. Those “right to lifers” who ignore women’s chants of “my body, my choice” when it comes to abortion, turn around and use the same mantra when it comes to wearing a mask in public or socially distancing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But this is not the first plague to cross the globe since the black death of the 14th Century. Barely more than a century ago, the Spanish flu decimated the global population. However, we are — as we often seem to do — failing to learn from history. The differing degrees of lockdown and community action between St. Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to prevent the spread of the virus in 1918 demonstrate the effects of government action versus no government inaction, personal responsibility and personal disregard. The second wave hit and those not heeding the warnings suffered, now as then.
“Now more than ever before”, the depths of greed continue to an unfathomable measure. Multi-millionaires — both in and out of Congress — argued it is irresponsible to provide the taxpaying citizens of the population with money to keep food on their tables, roofs over their heads, or heat in their homes. While the majority of Americans figured out how to survive the year on the magnanimity of $1,800.00, the collective billionaires in the United States saw their wealth grow by more than one-trillion dollars: $1,000,000,000,000.00. The rest of us experienced varying degrees of loss. Lost wages, lost jobs and incomes, lost savings, lost homes, loss of life.
As most of the country scrimped and saved, hoarded basic necessities, learned to work from home and took on gig work, the wealthiest 1% hunkered down in their bunkers or summer homes. They traveled by private jet, took to their yachts, and further lined their pockets buying the stock market and the supply chain commodities that make society function, only to mark them up at a premium. Those that can afford first-class, concierge medical services bought life-saving treatment while trying to convince the rest of us the virus was a hoax.
Again, this is not the first time we have seen economic depression where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The decadence of the 1920s led into the financial tragedy of the 1930s and corporate magnates sucking the country dry of its cold hard cash. The farce of Trickle Down Economics of the 1980s repeatedly entrenched racial and gender inequality, generational poverty, and stagnant wage growth. Baby Boomers who benefited from the financial growth of the post-war era tell Gen X and Millennials how easy it is while they forget that they hoard jobs, money, and opportunities for them to achieve the same levels the Boomers have. Now we face record unemployment and mass eviction from our homes so that Jeff Bezos can under pay his workers and cheat them of health coverage…during a pandemic. The richest man in the WORLD is more inclined to put his employees in his homeless shelter than pay them a livable wage, apparently in the belief that employees are better as write-offs than expenses.
“Now more than ever before” isn’t a sympathetic aphorism employed to inspire us to yank up our bootstraps and push for a brighter tomorrow. “Now more than ever before” is an acknowledgment that shit only matters now because it is affecting the majority of Americans rather than the poor misfortunate few we see on the nightly news. It is a dog-whistle used by corporations, organizations, and individuals who want us to believe that greed doesn’t exist and that social change has never been a “thing” before. They want us to believe that by shopping, dining, and giving what we have to them, the world will get better.
Now more than ever before, those of us who have been comfortably sitting on the sidelines of history, need to get off our asses and do something. But don’t just get out there and shout louder than those that need to be heard. Listen first. Learn first. Then, when you are confident you can speak or act with the collective in mind, amplify those voices that need to be heard. Act with a sense of purpose and good for all. Teach others who want to listen and learn and who will carry the message and the fight forward.
