Under the Social Awning
By Cylon2036 we/us
Pseudopod Certified
“How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan
They called it a consensus, though everyone knew there had been no counting. By noon, social media was filled with certainty. Certainty had become extremely common. It carried hearsay, and traveled in groups. If you stood with it, you felt safe, like standing under an awning in the rain. Lauren stood under it.
She was, by nearly every private measure, a good person. She helped find lost cats. She called her mother twice a week. She had once taken a professional risk to defend a colleague who was unable to defend herself. She believed in fairness the way people believe in gravity. She had always stood firmly principled.
The screens of social media pulsed with the name of the local newspaper and its publisher and editor, a single father who rented his modest home. A sentence clipped from an article in the paper had gone viral, stripped of context, polished into something sharp and damning.
The crowd had done the rest. Committee Chairpersons had been notified. Some friends and friendly acquaintances abandoned him. Now came the final step of public condemnation. Smears and false accusations would follow. Silence would be interpreted. Lauren felt the familiar social pressure unfurl.
If she refused to join the mob’s chorus, there would be consequences, subtle at first. The slow cooling of conversations and invitations. Her partner’s reputation was important to her and her sister’s grant application depended on community support. No one said these things out loud anymore, and they didn’t need to.
If she joined in, the cost was internal, a tightening in her chest. A story she would later tell herself about how this wasn’t really harm, how it was only participation, how her single voice didn’t change the possible outcomes. Internal costs were untracked. They didn’t compound socially. They were invisible.
Lauren looked at the publisher’s editorials defending himself. He was not playing the victim, and that somehow made it more difficult. She searched her memory for something to justify the act, some rumor, some proof that he deserved what was happening. The social media smears continued.
Participation was easy, just type and hit “post.” Lauren thought of a line she once loved from a Bob Dylan lyric. She couldn’t quite remember it. What she remembered instead was the exhaustion of being brave when no one thanked you for it. She typed a few words supporting the mob, then hit “post.”
The mob accepted her input with affirming chimes. Somewhere, a score adjusted by a fraction so small it would never be noticed alone. The crowd’s certainty deepened, fed by many similar posts as social media attacks swelled. Certainty had a short half-life once its work was done. Lauren closed her laptop.
That night, she dreamed of social justice, and supporting community charities and housing initiatives. In the morning, she woke early and made coffee for her partner. She did all the small good things she knew how to do. They still counted. She promptly took care of her remaining volunteer tasks for the day.
She wondered, not for the first time, how many of them equaled the cost of one honest support for a neighbour under unjust fire, and why the answer never appeared anywhere she could see it. Her partner reminded her that they were under the awning, and out of the rain.
