I was scrolling through my Facebook feed a few days ago, and came across the following headline:
“San Francisco tech bro: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff raff’”
The article was referring to an open letter written to the mayor and police chief of San Francisco, with the author expressing his “concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem” in the city. He goes on to describe “three separate instances and countless times” where he and his family were “approached for money and harassed” by homeless people over the long weekend. The letter contains more than a few eyebrow raisers, including the following passage near the end,
The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.
Yikes.
If this is the only context you have about the letter so far, you likely already have a strong opinion about the author and his worldview. I’m willing to bet it’s not very flattering.
And you know what? If you think this guy is a d-bag with a capital D, I’m not going to argue with you. My initial response was very similar.
But after seeing the topic resurface on my Facebook feed, I’ve started to question whether this reaction is any more reasonable than the contents of the letter itself.
Let me explain.
It’s easy to read a post like this and see it for what it is—self-centered and out of touch, with a hint of pompous arrogance. Where things get a little more complicated is when you actually try to place these thoughts within any kind of real-world context, let alone pull some kind of useful lesson away from them. This requires unpacking the motives behind the author’s views, and thinking about why someone believes what they believe. Tricky business when the content is so brash and easy to reject. We want to take his views at face value because they just seem so unequivocally… wrong.
But the empathy we hound this author for lacking is exactly what we’re missing when we jump to quick judgements about his character. He may be aloof and uneducated at best, or condescending and elitist at worst, but it’s difficult to conclude why someone is the way they are just by using surface-level information (even if that information is their own poorly written stream-of-consciousness). Our rush to ridicule and criticize this “tech bro” does nothing to make the conversation more productive. It may actually add fuel to the fire of divineness we’re so quick to point out is promoted by his seemingly ignoring post.
And does that make us any better? Or are we just as complicit in fostering the culture of self-centeredness we need to move away from?
I’m not saying you should like or agree with everything you read. Or that you shouldn’t react a certain way based on your own knowledge, background, and life experiences. But we should all try to take a second to breathe before we rush to judgement, to really absorb the totality of a situation before jumping to fully support one side of an issue.
After reading the initial post, along with some excellent satire in response, I was left shaking my head. On one hand, I was appalled that someone could have such an inflated sense of self-importance, along with such little empathy for other human begins, that he felt airing this letter publicly was a positive contribution to society.
At the same time, I can understand where the author is coming from. I can see how a kid growing up in a sheltered, upper-middle-class community in Southern California would have very little exposure to diversity or class inequity. It’s understandable that the same person would shit bricks when approached by a disheveled drug addict in the Tenderloin at 8:30am on a Wednesday on his way to work. And finally, it makes sense that someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to studying and working in computer science might not be well-equipped to express his viewpoints as effectively using the written word as someone who studied english or journalism.
Not that I agree with him, by any means. But I’ve at least given myself the space to meet him halfway; if he wanted to have a conversation with me to explain himself and his beliefs, I’m at a place where I could have an open-minded discussion about it. I would actually welcome such an interaction because that’s where shared understanding and growth comes from.
My concern is that too many of us don’t give ourselves the time and space to think about an issue on our own. We form opinions quickly, and solidify them by blasting them out to our friends on social media. The fast pace of our daily news cycles could have something to do with this, polluting our thoughts about a topic before we’ve truly had the chance to grasp what it means to us personally.
And headlines like the one I mentioned earlier could shoulder part of the blame. I’ll repeat it again:
“San Francisco tech bro: ‘I don’t want to see homeless riff raff’”
Really? This dude’s a “tech bro?” What does that term even mean anymore? From what I gather, he’s a little nerdy, possibly antisocial, and deeply engrossed in a startup he’s building. A little pompous and self-centered, perhaps, but is he really a mindless, chest pounding “bro?”
Or is this just another example of formulaic click-bait from an online media publication?
Wait a second…
Did you notice that? I almost did it myself this time. Rushing to judgment before stopping to really think about what I was saying.
Only this time I was about to blame online media organizations for promoting sensualism over pure facts. It would have been easy to blame the journalist for her greedy use of attention-grabbing headlines solely for the sake of clicks. But that would have overlooked a few basic facts that would make this line of thought ridiculous.
First, she’s probably just trying to do her job. She wants to succeed in her career just like everyone else, and is likely working against tough deadlines to make her bosses happy. Since it’s easy to typecast the guy who wrote the open letter as a “tech bro,” she rolled with it. The phrase is catchy and polarizing in today’s media landscape, and will likely lead to a boatload of clicks, meaning she’s doing her job effectively. Which leads me to the largest hidden truth regarding online media companies—they’re in the entertainment business. They make money selling ads, and ads are sold based on eyeballs. To attract eyeballs they need to entertain, not necessarily inform, their readers. Once that’s understood, it’s silly to get upset over an attention-seeking headline that stirs a bit of controversy. That’s what they’re in business to do!
Do you see how slippery this slope can be? If we don’t pause to ask ourselves, ‘wait, but why?’ often enough, we end up with a warped perception of the world around us. Not to mention lots of unnecessary stress, angst, and divisiveness.
Whether the topic of conversation is a news story, world event, or a friend expressing their point of view, we all need to chill out and absorb the situation before forming a strong point of view. We can still be opinionated, but it doesn’t help to have a knee-jerk reaction, and then call someone an asshole. Even if they are a retched human being, that kind of response isn’t going to solve anything.
As hard as it is to believe sometimes, most people actually do mean well. If we care about fairness and compassion, we owe it to ourselves to practice the empathy we so often preach.