A collective Primal Scream

I have a close relative whom I've loved dearly for nearly half a century. It was only after we became social media friends, however, that I discovered she is an avid partisan. Make that rabid partisan. Whenever I open Facebook, my Notification globe bleeds red with urgent missives--it's her daily in-flow of videos, cartoons, and other headlines designed to enlighten me about the hanky-panky of political evil-doers.

Other friends and family proselytize across a spectrum of political thought, and beat the drum for pet causes. One matriarch frequently emails me jokes making sport of one candidate in particular. (She knows I like the guy, so I have to assume she's being passive aggressive--a common, if somewhat unlovable, trait in my family.)

I used to get irked by the chatter. Sometimes, especially when someone forwarded me a particularly outlandish bit of Internet lore, I'd retort with articles of rebuttal, or a link to Snopes.


Now I've changed my thinking. It's been a rough week for America, and we're heading into a hotly contested political season. People are cranky.We're not just cranky at the other guy's candidates. We're pretty much ticked at our own candidates, too. Everyone's upset about different things, and no one is coming up with great solutions. Or any solutions.


When I was at Wellesley years ago, we had a biannual tradition known as Primal Scream. On the eve of final exams, we'd run through the hallways collecting haggard, haunted-looking freshmen. We'd gather them on the roof of McAfee Hall and tell them to scream. Just scream as loud as you can, we said. Get it all out. There we'd stand, 40 or so young women strong, screaming from the roof at the top of our lungs. God knows what the campus police must have thought about Primal Scream. And then, slowly, we'd begin to laugh. Huge gales of giddy, exhausted, exam-demon purging laughter. Somehow cleansed, we'd return to the books.


I'm beginning to see the outcries on social media as our society's Primal Scream. Instead of standing on a rooftop, we're tweeting and venting from Facebook and Twitter.


Thirty-plus years ago in Paddy Chayefsky's "Network", an anchorman loses his cool on the air. He exhorts his viewers to get mad, throw open a window, and scream.  Back in the day the idea of a raving anchorman was an absurd, darkly funny notion. Now it's SOP. This will give you an idea: Yesterday when I was playing Howard Beale's "Network" speech on my laptop, my husband padded through the room.


"It's just the same old news over and over again," he complained, mistaking Chayefsky's Academy Award-winning speech for a cable news opinionator.


As an author, I try to curb my instincts on social media. For example, I'll reread this post three times to make sure I've purged it of any identifiable sectarian tilt. But I no longer resent speechifying by family and friends. I have reframed it in my mind. I see us all standing at our windows and on the rooftops, unleashing our malaise into the dark. It might be a cleansing thing for the collective soul.


In your author role, do you steer clear of politics, religion et al online? Have you ever stepped unwittingly into a hornet's nest by expressing a particular view?