The Mountain and the Molehill
In the summer of 2019, my wife and I made the front page of Reddit, all because of a stupid water leakage. When the incident first started I had just stepped out to take out dogs outside. My wife was in the kitchen when out of nowhere water began bursting from the ceiling resulting in Jumanji level rain from the inside of our home. She quickly bolted up and grabbed what was immediately next to her in the kitchen, a series of our biggest pots and pans, and placed them under our not-so-little indoor rainstorm just to find something to collect the water. When I came back in I was, obviously, shocked at what I was seeing. To be clear, this wasn’t just a minor leak, there was a full-on monsoon coming from the ceiling. I quickly pulled out my phone and filmed a brief 15 seconds of the endeavor so we could have proof for when we would later talk to our apartment complex (which we absolutely ended up needing as they didn’t believe us when we told them how bad it was). After the brief 15 seconds of evidence gathering I jumped in and we swapped out the pots and pans for some Rubbermaid totes that we used to store our camping gear. While these totes can hold several gallons of water, the amount of water pouring into them resulting in them filling up in a matter of minutes after we would dump them in the bathtub down the hall – Fill, dump, repeat, and repeat. This nightmare cycle went on for about 3 hours before our apartment maintenance crew lackadaisically showed up to help us fix the problem.
I later uploaded the video to the subreddit r/WellThatSucks (because… well… it sucked). Roughly 12 hours later my video had over 60k upvotes and had made the front page of Reddit. If you’re not familiar with what it means to reach the front page of Reddit, it essentially means that your post was popular enough to be showcased on Reddit’s homepage, a place that highlights every subreddit (a niche forum on the site) rather than just the specific communities you are following. So our post had gone viral. Amongst those views were a flurry of comments. While several of the comments sympathized with our situation, there were a good portion of comments that I’ll never forget. Many of them took jabs at me for “just standing there filming, rather than helping his wife.” There were other comments that took jabs at my wife for thinking that cooking pots were sufficient to collect the water. People criticized both of us for being “dumb millennials who didn’t know how to turn off the water”. And so on, and so on. I eventually ended up taking the entire post down, because I still had yet to deal with our apartments and I didn’t want this video to negatively affect anything in the process.
When it comes to the comments, many of these individuals were taking a 15-second video, a fraction of a 4-hour ordeal, and thinking they knew the entire situation – or knew better. People had formed incredibly intense opinions about what they would have done differently in the situation, about my actions, my wife’s actions, about us as individuals, and so on. All of this was formed around a tiny sliver of a much much longer ordeal. It was shocking to see people so violently believe they were right, even though they barely knew what had actually happened.
Our brief little situation reminded me of what happened earlier that year pertaining to the Covington High School kids at the Lincoln Memorial. If you don’t remember, here’s a little refresher: An interaction occurred at the Lincoln Memorial between a series of MAGA-wearing students from Covington High School and a Native American activist. Short videos of this encounter were uploaded to social media and quickly blew up online. I remember seeing strongly worded, intense opinions around these “racist kids” shared on social media. All around a short video of a kid smugly looking at a Native American man. I remember seeing a friend share the video and call the students bigots. I couldn’t see how they were bigots, but this friend of mine is a smart cookie and so I trusted them and also jumped on the bandwagon. I shared the video and shared my critique of these poor lost souls.
News outlets began covering the story as well, many of which criticized the students claiming their behavior was “reprehensible” and embarrassing. Several large profile publications such as The Washington Post, CNN, and NBC jumped on the bandwagon that I was seeing across social media, referring to the high school students (essentially) as far-right bigots. On top of that, public figures like Elizabeth Warren claimed that the Native American man had "endured hateful taunts” from the students. Celebrities like Kathie Griffin asked her followers to identify, shame, and dox the students. This had now become a national argument and everyone had a very strong opinion around a very short video.
Shortly after (2 days later) a longer cut of the video from a different vantage point was released, showing that (surprise surprise) we didn’t have the full story. In fact, it was actually the students who were being taunted and were just trying to stand their ground. The students and their families ended up suing several news outlets as well as a dozen public figures, several of which ended up settling in court. Unfortunately by the time the real story came around, everyone had already made up their mind. Even though news outlets published retractions and apologies, people had ironclad opinions about these students, Trump, and the “other side” of the political aisle. Pandora’s box had been opened.
Not only are mountains being made out of molehills, but in many cases, the alleged molehill is a non-existent mirage in distance. Very strong, often very angry opinions are being formed around non-existent issues. There is no better example of a rage-infused group than the Star Wars fandom. As someone who is deeply ingrained in this world, I can attest to how angry certain factions of this group can get when things don’t go according to their head-canon. This has been happening ever since the introduction of the Ewoks in “Return of the Jedi” all the way up to nearly everything about the prequel trilogy. (Note: There are many lovely, level-headed, wonderful Star Wars fans out there. Not all of them are toxic.)
The most recent example of this toxicity, in conjunction with the rest of this blog post, is found in the outrage around the publishing event known as The High Republic. In January of 2021, Lucasfilm Publishing released a brand new era of Star Wars books known as The High Republic. These books tell the story of the Jedi and the Republic at their peak, 200 years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. When the books first launched in 2021 they quickly rose to the top of many bestseller lists with incredibly positive reviews among critics.
Unfortunately, like many things in Star Wars, the good vibes didn’t last long. Clickbait YouTubers like “Geeks and Gamers” began slamming the High Republic initiative claiming that it was “Woke-Propaganda”. Many other pages with a similar audience and tone also began making parallel claims spouting the rhetoric that Kathleen Kennedy and Disney were pushing their liberal ideologies (forced diversity, feminism, anti-male messaging, etc…) through these books. These YouTubers and clickbait blog sites I’m referring to aren’t small-time, either. This isn’t someone with just a couple hundred followers. Many of them have incredibly large audiences who (based on the comment section) are now all on board with this belief.
As someone who has read the books, I can tell you that I not only enjoy them but not once did I ever consider the books to be pushing some sort of left-wing agenda. Yet lo and behold, the belief is now out there and is strongly held by many people. I encourage you to look at the YouTube comment section of Star Wars’ High Republic videos. The down-vote to up-vote ratio is absurd. Many of the comments are vile, visceral responses shouting how big of a failure “the Woke-Republic is.” After reading the books and speaking with the people who despise them, I encounter the same sad reality over and over again. The majority of angry people that I have encountered have not only never read the books, but have no desire to, purely because of what they’ve heard online. They are literally judging a book by its cover.
Judging things on a shred of information has sadly become the norm. The Washington Post found that 60% of users will share a news article after only having read the headline. People are regularly getting their news and opinions from memes. I have people in my life who have strongly negative opinions about Obama, but (based on my encounters with them) have based these opinions on memes and clickbait “news” sites. While I want to be optimistic and tell people to stop being lazy and do the full research, I’m pessimistic that will happen, primarily due to just how much information exists these days. Yes, we have the whole world at our fingertips, but it is a tsunami of information, that most people just don’t have time for – or at least they don’t make time for it. Social media, 24/7 cable news, and the binge-television model have conditioned us to focus on quantity over quality – and it has created some pretty sub-par quality. Instagram Reels are all just the same carbon copy posts from everyone else with the same overplayed songs repeated again and again. Most political opinions these days are just unfounded fear/rage-bait parroted from cable news hosts. Hollywood is full of sequels and reboots that rarely bring anything new or substantial to the table. To wrap this up, there are 2 different Bo Burnham quotes that come to my mind:
Could I interest you in everything all of the time? A little bit of everything all of the time. Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. Anything and everything all of the time.
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all. There it is again, that funny feeling.