About a month ago, I left the D.C. area for a weekend and visited a small town in southwestern Iowa. I had ended up in that small town almost by accident in late 2019 and wrote a big magazine piece about what I found — tiny Imogene, Iowa, beating the odds and hanging on thanks to great community institutions, including a church and an Irish pub.
Imogene hosts a town festival, Shamrock Days, every July. So this year, I made sure to visit during Shamrock Days. I spoke to the locals about all sorts of things, including their pandemic experience. Yesterday, the Washington Examiner published that piece, and I tweeted it out.
Read the article. It might be eye-opening if you live in a big city or its suburbs. I wrote about what changed during the pandemic, and what didn’t. I wrote about the tragic and the happy. I wrote about the deaths, and the lives, and the nervous breakdowns in Imogene and surrounding areas.
Are you suggesting that as crowded the streets in NYC are, they should have carried on as usual last year?
— Alison Berkowitz (@aliberk65) August 6, 2021
Readers on Twitter reacted by, I am not joking, getting angry and scolding the Washington Examiner for publishing the piece.
It’s worse than you can imagine. Can’t believe they even printed this.
Imogene is a city in Fremont County, Iowa, United States. The population was 72 at the 2010 census.
— Kevin (@kevin_cracknell) August 6, 2021
Here, one Twitter user, a self-described “progressive in a conservative town,” hypothesized about more deaths in Imogene and said no one could mourn such deaths.
When they show someone from there on a cover of a paper dying of Covid, don’t complain about how unsettling it is.
— Marie J. (@MarieJ19) August 6, 2021
There are worse tweets in that thread. The generous interpretation of the responses here is that the folks never opened the article and assumed that I was somehow positing some superiority of small towns over big cities. That’s probably mostly true, but it’s also a bit too charitable. There’s increasingly a desire on social media to turn every single story into a politicized culture war. So, if I write here’s what life was like for a different part of America, if it’s the wrong part of America — if it resembles that dreaded “diner in Middle America” that so many commentators spent 2016 through 2020 mocking — it earns the reaction: Those people are no better than us!
No one said they were.
So, is this something Twitter causes, because it makes it so easy to infer someone is making a point that you dislike? Or do we all just hate each other, and Twitter allows us to say it out loud?
I point to my tiny event on Twitter because it is in some ways more comprehensible than the bile launched at my friend Bethany Mandel. Bethany has vociferously opposed mask mandates on young kids but is sending her children to a summer camp that requires them. She has argued that a day of masking in 90-degree heat and 95% humidity is more dangerous to the health of an 8-year-old than being unmasked.
It’s hard to explain even what happened, but for a hint, look at this tweet by MSNBC host Joy Reid.
I feel like you should probably see a doctor, Bethany — and not because of the mask. Whatever’s in your belly or lungs or on your skin seems quite unhealthy. The junk at your feet also might be a clue as to what’s going on… Doctors and nurses wear masks all day with no issues. https://t.co/PfSOsuDcSE
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ? (@JoyAnnReid) August 6, 2021
Oh, and her fans LOVED it. Making fun of a child’s hygiene (or maybe she lacked reading comprehension and is mocking Bethany’s hygiene — so progressive!) earned her 900 retweets and 9,000 likes in a few hours.
I’d like to think Twitter is making us worse, but sometimes, I fear it’s just revealing how we already were.
