Be This Guy, Instead of the Angry Jerk You're Becoming
Plus, a hate letter to the Iowa Caucuses
I don’t want to blame the Internet for making me an angrier person. But someone has to take the fall, and if I blame myself, my anger management coach fears it could set me off. It’s either blaming the Internet, or else the ‘roid rage I experience from taking performance-enhancing drugs to juice a muscular prose style. So let’s stick with the Internet.
It’s not that I necessarily go looking for trouble, but since trouble is everywhere these days, it finds me with minimal effort. Over there is a story about preposterous Senator Mike Lee: a pretend Trump idolater (he’s afraid to appear otherwise), who not only just declared his wholehearted support for Mango Mussolini, but who had the cheek to say that the serial defendant is our “one opportunity to choose order over chaos.” Lee is a Mormon, so he doesn’t even have the excuse of being drunk when he said this.
And while the right’s gone bonkers, the left’s no great shakes, either. Why, over there is a survey in which 31 percent of Gen Z’ers between the ages of 18 and 29 think that Osama bin Laden’s views were “good.” Unlike Whitney Houston, I believe the children aren’t our future. At least I hope they’re not, unless we want a future in which we kill The Jews and fly planes into skyscrapers.
But it’s not just depressing political news that makes me want to put a fist through my screen, or at least your screen, since the Internet is also hopelessly addictive, and daddy needs his medicine so he doesn’t get the dystopian DT’s. It’s also the open sewer that is social media. I’m not “on” Twitter, as in, I don’t post. But I search it plenty, the way a lion might show up at a savanna watering hole to spy its next meal. Except instead of asking if I should consume an impala or a wildebeest, I ask myself if I should consume a migrant-vs-native European fistfight, or a supermarket checkout line beatdown, or a girl-on-girl school hallway tussle (it’s always a little scary when they swing each other around by the ponytail, helicopter-rotor-blade-style.)
I am not linking to any of these. They’re awful. They make me feel filthy. I lose all faith in humanity after 30 seconds of watching. So imagine how despondent I feel 30 minutes later, when I’m still watching, because it’s hard to look away. Did that ingrate Nigerian migrant hooligan really just push a woman off a bus, face-first, onto the concrete? But oooh, the Irishman who dealt with him has a killer left hook. Good form! Plant and pivot your whole body! Conor McGregor would be proud. There are literally tens of thousands of these videos, and they all seem to have found their way into my tailored algorithm. We are surrounded by a-holes, it seems. Made all the more apparent if there’s a mirror in the vicinity, since the a-holes are often us, craving more of the violence and nihilistic exhibitionism that is desensitizing us all. Which the rage-monkey engineers know when they push this poison at us. After all, what is a personalized algorithm besides a reflection of the blackness of our own soul, an ugly collection of our proclivities and perversions? (“No, honey, I have no idea why assless leather chaps keep turning up in my pop-up ads.”)
And yet, amidst this darkness shone a ray of light last week. It came from an unlikely source.
I was probably on hour two or so of perusing the Twitter feed of “Wild Content,” which bills itself as “posting what the news won’t show. Viewer discretion is advised.” As if I’m supposed to turn away when spying a woman throwing her dog at a man during an altercation, or a McDonald’s manager chucking a blender at a customer for throwing food, or someone stealing an Amazon package off someone’s porch while disguised as a traffic barrel. But next thing you know, this lovely video comes my way, in which a crotchety old white woman — a grandKaren in Internet parlance — hectors a middle-aged black man in a do-rag for keeping her awake and not turning off his outdoor rope lights. The whole encounter is caught on his front-porch Ring video. And the first thing I thought is here we go. This dude is going to punch this old lady out. Since nobody on social media these days seems to have any compunction about showing their own violence, especially if it is the strong stomping the weak. Which seems to be a point of pride, rather than of embarrassment.
Her name, or nickname (it’s unclear which), seems to be “Journey,” which is what he calls her. His name, I learned after some sleuthing, is Michael Robinson (Tiktok handle: “illstyle85.” The video went viral on TikTok before migrating to Twitter). Journey seems kind of annoying to be honest, and the poor doll might have a touch of dementia. An earlier video showed her incessantly ringing Robinson’s doorbell, waking him in the middle of the night just hours before he had to go to work, asking him to turn off the lights. The police were apparently called, and made the determination that his lights weren’t shining into her window. But here she was again.
She comes to his door, and Robinson good-naturedly answers it, asking, “What’s crackin’, baby?” She again complains about his lights, which she says are keeping her up. She asks him to turn them off in her shaky, papery voice, saying she doesn’t mind if he keeps them on until 10 pm or so. He reminds her that they’ve been through this before. She offers that she has to put pillows over her window so that she can sleep. He reminds her that the cops came, took a look at it, and determined that his lights were not shining in her window. She seems unmoved, waving her hand in disgust. I brace myself for Robinson to cold-cock her. And then, he does a remarkable thing. Or what has come to be thought of as remarkable.
He says, “But I’ll do you this. I will turn them off at 10 o’clock.” Journey says, now meekly, “Is that okay? I’m sorry.” Robinson responds, “No, you’re fine. I got you.” Journey responds, “I don’t mean to be a mean neighbor, and I want you as my neighbor.” And then Robinson drops the hammer: “I got it, Journey……See what I think it is, Journey, is you just need to come over when you’re lonely. Talk, and have some food and some wine. How ‘bout that?”
Journey seems overwhelmed by his kindness. She puts her hands to her face, overcome and near tears, and says, “I’m sorry.” Robinson laughs, forgivingly. I wasn’t going to write about this, but it genuinely moved me, so I had no choice. Because I have learned, in the course of writing this Substack, that I ignore things that move me at my own peril. Since my tastes for demonstrations of true humanity are hardly unique, and tend to move others, too. So have a look for yourself. Viewer discretion is not advised:
https://twitter.com/NoCapFights/status/1743431555878727829
Though as a professional pessimist, I’m forever willing to look at the glass as half-broken. And so I must say that the thing that troubles me about this video is that I find it remarkable at all. Simple acts of kindness should be the rule instead of the exception. Maybe if we showed more of it, it would become commonplace, and not a viral video. So we should all be Michael Robinson, when we get a chance. Anger and revenge are easy. Without boring you with the details, I’ve taken after my own perceived enemies two or three times in the last week. Sometimes, near-violently, or at least verbally so. It felt good, for about a minute, as I was high on my own indignation. And then I thought, “What would it look like if I were better than that? If I acted like the guy I just saw in some clickbait video that juked me with a head-fake?” Featuring a man who served as the living embodiment of the verses in Paul’s love chapter to the Corinthians. (1 Corinthians 13):
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
What would it look like to live in that world?
On another note, yeah, I know I’m getting soft. I knew I was in trouble on the above piece when the only other publication I found that wrote about it was Upworthy, the Hallmark Channel of the Internet. So to grit things up a bit, for my hard-bitten cynical readers, here’s an Ask Matt screed I wrote a little over a decade ago about the Iowa caucuses, which are taking place today, and which I unapologetically hate with my whole heart.