A few months ago, amid two separate downtown Toronto rallies — one in support of the hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and the other in support of besieged Palestinian civilians — I stepped onto the TTC wearing a Star of David necklace.
Due to the tremendous rise in reported hate crimes in the city since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war — and the never-ending cascade of hateful rhetoric online — I felt mildly nervous, for the first time in my life, about wearing the necklace in public.
But what happened next restored my faith in humanity — not because of our unshaken ability to show compassion for one another despite our differences, but because of our unshaken ability to completely ignore each other.
On the subway that day I observed protesters carrying Palestinian flags embark and disembark the subway often passing or riding nearby to protesters carrying Israeli flags. Many were families with children. I did not witness an unkind word shared between them nor even a dirty look.
As for everyone else on the train, they appeared more disturbed by the guy eating an especially redolent tuna sandwich than the placards, flags, (or necklaces) in their midst.
This isn’t to say my experience is universal. Go online and behold hundreds of videos of yelling matches between protesters on the subway, at universities and in shopping malls. We can’t and shouldn’t downplay the uptick in hate crimes in our city: the bomb threats, the evacuations of Jewish schools, the physical assault of mosque worshippers.
But it is OK — and good for us all — to acknowledge and celebrate the many moments of banal public cohesion that don’t make it to social media in which Torontonians display their differences, and the sky doesn’t fall.
There are pundits lining up on various social media platforms to tell you that Canada’s social contract is in tatters and that civil society is on the verge of collapse for a number of reasons: the war in the Middle East, the economy, urban crime, identity politics run amok. I’m here to tell you that while things are indeed bad out there, they are never as apocalyptic as they appear on the internet.
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It is not naïve to acknowledge this, nor does it do a disservice to the people whose worlds have been shattered — in Gaza, in Israel and beyond. If anything, it is productive to put things into perspective.
“Doomscrolling” is an impediment to positive action of any kind — personal or political — because it overwhelms us with ugliness and tragedy and convinces us that our problems are too far gone to solve. Research links the practice to negative physical and mental health outcomes, no small deal as a new Canadian-led study has found that roughly one third of the world’s population may be at risk of a smartphone addiction.
In the New York Times recently, writer Roger Rosenblatt encouraged his readers to ditch traditional self-absorbed New Year’s resolutions in favour of attempting to make the world a better place.
He writes: “What if, instead of planning our exercise regimens, we focused our intentions on all that is undesirable in human activity — wars, bigotry, brutality, the despoiling of the earth — and sought to address it?”
I’d like to propose a less ambitious New Year’s resolution for 2024 that is at once selfish and altruistic: rather than save the world, let’s simply strive to be present in it. In other words, let’s stay off social media. Not forever but for far longer than we are used to: Twenty minutes, an hour, a full day.
Because we are unlikely to make the world or our ourselves better if we exist in a perpetual stream of bile and paranoia: if we are convinced that everyone hates everyone else and that our differences are insurmountable. Much of the time they aren’t even noticed.
This year I'm going to put my phone away more often and take solace in a Toronto crowd — where despite the headlines, most people are still happily ignoring each other.
