David McElroy

A friend of mine found herself in serious financial trouble this week because of something that wasn’t her fault.

She’s a single mother with children to support. She works hard and she has a lot of pride, so she wasn’t asking anybody for help. She was simply upset and overwhelmed by what had happened.

I saw her after work tonight and she told me about the situation. I listened for a while, then I handed her $200.

She immediately tried to refuse it.

“I can’t take this,” she said.

But I knew she needed the money badly enough that her pride was trying to say something that reality wouldn’t allow. I told her she was going to take it and we weren’t going to make a big deal out of it.

I thought she was going to cry.

Not because it was some enormous amount of money, but because she was overwhelmed by the idea that somebody would help her when she needed help. No strings attached. No expectation of repayment. No hidden agenda.

That’s what I told myself about my motives. After I left, something uncomfortable began bothering me.

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I’m trapped in a society where all the important public figures are middle schoolers.

Not actual middle schoolers, of course. Many of the loudest and most influential voices in our culture are wealthy executives, media personalities, political leaders and adults with millions of followers. But the most popular and prominent of them behave with the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old trying to dominate a cafeteria conversation.

Every disagreement becomes a playground fight. Every issue becomes tribal. Every insult demands retaliation. Every thought must be expressed immediately. Every opinion must be performed publicly. Every emotional reaction becomes content.

And the louder, more impulsive and more outrageous someone behaves, the more visibility that person receives.

That’s not happening by accident.

Years ago, media critic Neil Postman warned that television was transforming public life into entertainment. (Read Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Please.) Television rewarded personalities more than ideas. It rewarded emotional immediacy more than thoughtful reflection. Politics, journalism, education and religion all slowly began adapting themselves to the demands of a medium built primarily for amusement.

But television now seems almost quaint — and downright intellectual — compared to what came afterward.

Social media didn’t merely continue those trends. It automated and intensified them.

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