The View from Afar

Or, Why I’ve Been Away

I owe you all an apology.

For the past five months, I’ve been incognito. MIA. I was never a content-producing machine, but I was a content-producing person, and now I am not one. You get the picture.

So what happened? Did I become suddenly disillusioned with American politics? No, that’s kind of been my thing — I became disillusioned with our major parties and prominent partisans before I ever had a chance to become illusioned with them. I have felt for the entirety of my adult life that alternatives, both to our politicians and to our whole way of thinking, were direly needed. That hasn’t changed.

Did I suddenly leave the country or something? No, I actually did that last March, as the realities of life with COVID were beginning to dawn on the world. It was then that I left the panicked streets of New York and boarded one of the last flights I could to join my long-distance-girlfriend-turned-long-distance-fiancée (now short-distance wife) in Southeast Asia. It was a profound life change, for sure, but it didn’t mean I wouldn’t write anymore. It was a few months after that, in fact, that I took on a new pen name, gathered up my old articles, and started this account, reaching my peak in involvement with U.S. politics from over 9,000 miles away.

Now, there were the usual excuses. Over the last five months, I did change jobs. I did move (locally) to a new apartment, and got to experience all the time-consuming endeavors — packing and unpacking, renovating, decorating — that new homeowners do. Perhaps most importantly, I lost the two primary foci of my writing — the tumultuous 2020 presidential election ended, and with it Bret Weinstein’s Unity2020 effort, a large part of what drew me into my recent political participation, seemed to fizzle away. But my efforts weren’t inherently tethered to Unity2020, or to the election — they dealt with general phenomena of division, and even with some of my own ideas to improve things, both on a policy and discourse level. And I did have time, even throughout the move and all the changes I experienced.

So then why did I stop writing, and why did I stop being involved?

The truth is not a matter of distractions, logistics, or any externalities at all. The truth is, that I no longer had the needed confidence in my message, or in my ability to deliver my message, to overcome the mental and psychological hurdles of attempting to engage in the discourse. In short, I no longer felt that I knew what to say, or how to say it.

This, I worry, is the plight of many a moderate, many a centrist, many a free-thinker, of many of the kinds of voices that are so painfully absent from our discourse. We find ourselves often unsure of our conclusions, so we shy from sharing our observations at the pace demanded by the Social Media Age. We don’t draw enough in the way of open ire and enthusiasm to get traction in a world of likes and shares. And we lack the conviction to want to throw ourselves into the realm of constant toxicity and hostility that is politics today. It is a problem that feeds upon itself as reasoned voices are pushed away from the forums of conversation, and the result is tragically logical — when the state of politics is such that one would have to be crazy to get involved, well, who do you think is going to get involved?

I’ve written about all this before — the self-sustaining problems of division, the self-fulfilling prophecies of discontent, the vicious cycles permeating through our politics. And I would like to think the evidence, the trends around our politics and discourse that have emerged and continued since my writings began, have pointed in my favor. The divisions did not subside when we faced unprecedented crisis in the form of COVID, nor did they subside when the election ended, instead feeding upon themselves and upon our pernicious distrust. Even the failures of myself and my compatriots (members and leaders of the various centrist and independent causes with which I’ve affiliated over the years) have pointed to the inherent hostility our discourse has to those thinking outside the box. But this is all a terribly pyrrhic victory to claim.

There is nothing to be gained in rehashing my points and ideas, and so I am left to observe, my sense of disconnect coming ever more in line with my extreme physical distance from all the goings-on. Feeling unable to help, it is hard not to succumb somewhat to an urge to tune out, to try to ignore all the madness. That, of course, is impossible, which presents an issue.

Watching, just watching, is awful. It pains me to see our divisions feeding and feeding insatiably upon themselves— friends and families feuding bitterly, ranters and ravers raging in ideological isolation. It pains me to see the opportunity our discord creates for our enemies, to foreign powers plotting our ruin and internal demagogues in pursuit of profit. And it pains me to see so many so fixated upon blame, so engulfed by the fog of war, that they cannot see how insurmountable our issues become if we are not able to effectively communicate about them, if we are not able to handle our profound distrust and alienation from one another.

All this is not to say that I’ve given up. I may get back into writing yet, if some good ideas should be so kind as to come to me. I cannot promise that I will be particularly productive or inspired — this article, I should note, was the victim of months of block and delays — but I will at least try to try.

More importantly, in working with Unity2020, in working with the Centrist Project and Unite America years before, in seeking out those who defy the mainstream dogmae, I have found some amazing thinkers, incredible minds with ideas that might really be able to help change the state of things, to finally bring people together. I look forward to seeing the next big idea that they produce, and I look forward to once again pouring my heart and soul into supporting a positive effort.

Until then, sadly, I’ll just have to watch.