Through a Looking Glass
Here lies a nuisance dedicated to sanity. - David Low
With the rise of QAnon, we are watching in real time the bastardization of the meaning and intent of community.
I’ve thought about community my whole life. My father, as a minister, formed churches out of thin air thereby creating communities. In high school, I would organize round robin basketball tournaments with my friends where we would utilize First Presbyterian Church’s gym in downtown Dallas, weekend sleepovers with a half-dozen or more friends in my father’s well-before-it’s-time “tiny” home (otherwise known as his study) in our backyard or have friends come along on car camping trips peregrinating around Texas or visiting the Deep South.
For an introvert, I’ve been pretty darn extroverted most of my life.
My river rafting business’ early mantra was simply “bringing people together” which has now morphed into “bringing people together one river trip at a time”. My month-long freshman wilderness orientation outdoor outing at Prescott College just happened to be a river trip, and I never looked back. The whitewater in Cataract Canyon was brief and fun, but it was the community aspect of the trip that burrowed into my psyche.
Ever since, I, and those in my employ, many of them graduates or interns from Western Washington University’s Recreation program, have tried to capture some of the magic I experienced on Prescott College’s orientation during our guide training course each and every spring over the last forty years. The seven day river trip that launches many people into a guiding career, or just introduces them to river running, or gives them a much deeper appreciation of rivers, is the catalyzing force for the community-at-large. It’s like a touchstone throughout the generations of guides. They’ve all been there.
I am not an expert on how to build community.
I think a river adventure - and the longer, the better - will work its wonders on the most jaded amongst us. I view the whole thing as a “build it, and they will come” scenario. I feel like I just provide the framework and allow nature and the river to do its thing.
But I didn’t start today’s column wanting to talk about the kumbaya feature of river running and how I have learned to tap into it. After all, politics consumes me.
I’m genuinely worried about the state of an inordinate number of our fellow Americans. Like the old Nashville-style country song, they’re looking for community in all the wrong places.
While listening to the New York Times’ Daily podcast, I heard this interview with a middle-aged woman who graduated from Harvard and - at present - lives alone. She has been sucked into the QAnon religion posing as a community online. She told the interviewer that she gets pissed off when her - former - friends and her sister say things like, “I am concerned about you.” When she hears them say those words, she cuts them off. And, by that, I mean, she cuts off all contact with them.
She explained to the interviewer, “What if I said, ‘I am concerned about you’ because you work at the New York Times?!”
As a refresher, dear alert ass readers, to be a part of the QAnon universe you have to believe that highly regarded politicians, global leaders and respected “elites” have control of the government, steal children and babies, and cannibalize them for their stem cells, or something. You will also have to believe, like Alice through the looking glass, at least “six impossible things before breakfast” almost every day.
I’m going to gloss over describing too much of QAnon because there is no need but there’s a reason why it is incredibly dangerous. It’s dangerous because it’s providing community for disenfranchised people who, like this lady, does not think anyone should be concerned for her. It’s their new religion and, due to people being isolated and politicians who refuse to refute it publicly - even after a mob amped up on QAnon bullshit nearly burned democracy to the ground - it’s transmogrifying right before our very eyes.
QAnon theories and conspiracies reside in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the form of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. One from Georgia and the other from Colorado. Those are the two who speak candidly and openly about it. Or have in the very recent past. They are the ones who vowed to carry weapons into the Capitol Building and initially ignored the magnetometers set up by the Capitol police. They are the representatives that tried to make the QAnon conspiracies become a reality on the 6th of January.
What began as an online community is beginning to flesh itself out into the real world. We’ve seen it evolving for quite some time, especially at the former president’s rallies. Now - apparently - white nationalists and militias are aligning themselves with the Q cult.
My fear is that it is not going away because it is packaged or dressed in the markings of a full-fledged community. The woman being interviewed mentioned that more than once. She thought it was offensive for anyone who cared for her to be concerned about her affiliation with the QAnon community because “it made her happy.” Educated Americans are happy to affiliate themselves with a belief system that is crazier than any religion and crazier than the Hale-Bopp cult known as Heaven’s Gate.
It was THIS crazy. From history.com:
Heaven’s Gate cult was led by Marshall Applewhite, a music professor who, after surviving a near-death experience in 1972, was recruited into the cult by one of his nurses, Bonnie Lu Nettles. In 1975, Applewhite and Nettles persuaded a group of 20 people from Oregon to abandon their families and possessions and move to eastern Colorado, where they promised that an extraterrestrial spacecraft would take them to the “kingdom of heaven.” Nettles, who called herself “Ti,” and Applewhite, who took the name of “Do,” explained that human bodies were merely containers that could be abandoned in favor of a higher physical existence. As the spacecraft never arrived, membership in Heaven’s Gate diminished, and in 1985 Bonnie Lu Nettles, Applewhite’s “sexless partner,” died.
During the early 1990s, the cult resurfaced as Applewhite began recruiting new members. Soon after the 1995 discovery of the comet Hale-Bopp, the Heaven’s Gate members became convinced that an alien spacecraft was on its way to earth, hidden from human detection behind the comet. In October 1996, Applewhite rented a large home in Rancho Santa Fe, explaining to the owner that his group was made up of Christian-based angels. Applewhite advocated sexual abstinence, and several male cult members followed his example by undergoing castration operations.
In 1997, as part of its 4,000-year orbit of the sun, the comet Hale-Bopp passed near Earth in one of the most impressive astronomical events of the 20th century. In late March 1997, as Hale-Bopp reached its closest distance to Earth, Applewhite and 38 of his followers drank a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka and then lay down to die, hoping to leave their bodily containers, enter the alien spacecraft, and pass through Heaven’s Gate into a higher existence.
That was a microscopic subset of Americans. Social media didn’t exist in the fashion it does today in the late 1990’s. The Daily host said experts guesstimate more than a million Americans, possibly more, are followers of the mysterious person or persons that goes by the initial Q.
The danger is that this insidious belief system is being sold more effectively than timeshare condominiums and couched in such a way it makes people feel they are a part of something. It was clear listening to the middle aged lady who went to Harvard that talking her out of her current state of happiness was not going to be easy.
I don’t have any answer for those who have already fallen through the looking glass and are already believing six impossible things before breakfast every day. (Here are some suggestions from experts.) My only suggestion is that, if you know someone who doesn’t have a community to latch on to, point them in the direction of a healthy, functioning community, or invite them into your healthy, functioning community. Since the pandemic is still with us, it might have to be a virtual community, or an outdoor-based community. The pandemic has certainly contributed to the fragility of people, making them more susceptible to outrageous claims.
A person’s need of community has always been true but, these days, it seems so much more poignant. So much more necessary.
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You can find community in all kinds of places. RV Parks! Parks where people gather to play chess or dominoes! Wine clubs disguised as book clubs! Pubs, like the pub in Cornwall, England, where the cute little movie called “Fisherman’s Friends” is set.
Recommended by my sister, and AAR, Pam, along with her husband, Ed, who is also an erstwhile AAR, I watched it last night and, if you are looking for a palate-cleanser of a movie from something grim or political or tense, this is it. It takes its sweet time to grow on you, but it does. You’ll feel good and, sometimes, that’s what we need at the end of the day.
Oh, and it’s a true feel-good story. This is the real Fisherman’s Friends with scenes from the movie.
Also, this is a two minute video on the pernicious randomness of racism.
Thanks for reading. Sharing. Passing it along. Thanks “Someone” for the support! - JLM
Ah, indeed. I knew the film spoke to me, but of course it was the community that grabs the heart.
I thought so as well.