John Kusters Jr.

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Month: November 2024

The Come From Away Experience

2024-11-24 /

This Thursday, I experienced Come From Away again. I’ve experienced it twice in theatres, a couple of times on Apple TV+, and countless times streaming the music. And I very explicitly and deliberately use the word “experience” instead of “watching” and/or “listening.” Of all of the theatre I’ve seen, Come From Away is the one that full pulls me in and makes me feel ALL of the feelings. Knowing that every actor on stage is portraying actual people who lived through the event, and are often speaking in the actual words of the affected people, turns my empathy up to 11 or more.

I understand and deeply feel the terror, the fear, the agony, the relief, the fascination of exploring new identities, and how the experience ultimately changed them. I want to believe I would act like the people of Gander with incredible grace on such short notice. I want to believe I’d be open to new experiences like lumberjack Kevin, I’d like to believe in new love found in horrible situations, I wish I would be clever enough to figure out how to communicate with fearful people and tell them they have no need to be anxious.

I feel my guts wrench when the pilot, Beverly, realizes that the thing that has brought her the most joy in her entire life was just used to kill hundreds and thousands of people. And Hannah, desperate to get news about her son, and then the heart-wrenching resolution. I am literally on the edge of tears throughout most of the 90 minutes, and there are several times I’m entirely overwhelmed. Even listening to the cast recording will bring the tears (as it’s doing at this moment as I’m typing this).

They often say theatre can take you away, allow you to live other people’s experiences. For me, Come From Away is the epitome of that maxim.

An Ill-Informed Election

2024-11-23 /

I’m seeing commentary, both in mainstream media and on social media, that expresses incredulity that people knew what Project 2025 and Agenda 47 were all about and yet a plurality of voters chose it anyways. The problem is, I’m not convinced the majority did know about this. In this election, the majority of voters did not get their news from reliable sources. They either got all their news from right-wing sources (Fox, NewsMax, ONN, etc.) or from algorithm-based social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, etc.) where the algorithm was feeding them an endless supply of highly biased information. Now that the election is over, and proponents of Project 2025 are exultant and not trying to obfuscate it anymore, a lot of Trump voters are hearing about it for the first time and are shocked. Sadly, truth-based news reporting failed to penetrate the right-wing “news” bubble.

I expect many of those voters will be outraged when parts of that agenda take effect. And I’m partly empathic, but equally partly scornful. Like, I’m sorry they’ll feel the consequences of tariffs, destruction of healthcare, immigrant detention camps, higher prices on everything, denaturalization, and dozens of other consequences of their vote along with the rest of us who tried to warn them, but I’m also angry about how easily they were duped, how they eagerly consumed a steady diet of lies and obfuscation from the right-wing propaganda machine, and showed disinterest in (or lack of capacity to) engage critical thinking skills.

Sadly I really don’t know how to address this disparity in veracity of sources of information. How do we get people who are dependent on a steady diet of fear and manufactured outrage to step outside of that ecosystem and let some facts into their worldview? Telling them “I told you so” will only increase resistance to deradicalization.

It’s infuriating how mainstream media, including those generally considered on the liberal end of the political spectrum, are currently attacking Bluesky for giving progressive people safe harbor, accusing us of building an echo chamber, while completely ignoring the right-wing echo chamber that radicalized and stupefied a little under 50% of this year’s voters.

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