Author Archives: rmbenson

IRL

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You may not need me tell you how it felt to stand street-side, shoulder to shoulder with 1500 neighbors carrying signs we each made from poster board, dowel rods and duct tape. You may not need me describe the pleasure of walking through a joyful crowd, occasionally asking pardon as I squeeze past an inflatable chicken, two rubber duckies, a few friendly dinosaurs and an honest-to-God Uncle Sam.

Can there be a name for the feeling of pride one gets from being one person among so many people waving at cars that honk in spontaneous expressions of appreciation and support as they drive past? Gratefully receiving something like 25 horn blasts of approval against every lonely middle finger lifted.

I needn’t tell you. You probably know. There were something like seven million of us standing in the streets of our cities, counties and towns.

A friend texted late morning: It’s so incredible. I can’t stop crying.

I know this feeling. This feeling of being in a body and that body being in solidarity with a bunch of other bodies all wanting the same thing. Enough is enough. No bad faith debates. No shitposts or subtweets. No flame wars.

This feeling is the final fatal fumes of Facebook leaving my veins. This feeling is IRL democracy.

Lesson from Lando

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There’s so much cowardice and corruption on display right now, it’s getting hard to know where to look.

Behold yet another corporate giant cravenly cave under force of cartoonishly unAmerican government intimidation. Whatever.

What’s the point of being a billionaire if you can’t stand against the arbitrary whims of whatever upsets Dear Leader today?

My feed is filled with Disney stans cancelling Disney+ subscriptions. So many of us, we crashed the server. Hard to say what effect this has long term, but the company that owns Star Wars should know better than anyone that the price a cool guy corporate executive pays in today’s deal with the Empire to keep his fiefdom safe tomorrow is never set. The cost goes up and up and up.

As poor Lando learned too late: “This deal gets worse all the time.”

Suffering from Individualism

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“If you are feeling despair, you might be suffering from individualism.”

— from Dr. Sarah Ray on “How to Age Up on a Warming Planet.” (from Atlantic Magazine podcast How to Age Up)

There is a story Americans tell ourselves: that we are each on our own. That self-reliance is the greatest virtue and what cannot be gotten through one’s own effort, strength and perseverance is not worth having. That there is nobility in silent, solitary struggle. Cowboys and Indians. Manifest Destiny. Pioneers across the prairie to the Pacific and then… ride rockets into space.

Rugged individualism.

This story tell us we are all in competition with one another for jobs, money, houses, energy, political power, recognition, dignity. A sickness that says the strongest, quickest, most cunning get the goods and everyone else is evolutionary dross and dead ends.

This is the tired myth we have been rehearsing for the past 40 years: some of us are heroes, the rest of us are victims. And so, we have taught ourselves to wait for some hero to arrive. Some Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr to lead the way. But Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr didn’t fall to earth like Superman. They didn’t wash ashore in a basket like baby Moses. They didn’t make the people possible. The people made them possible with their stories, their aspirations, their hopes. The people created the conditions for heroic acts by working in groups, lifting each other up with encouragement and imagination for the better days that could be ahead. What the better future looks like. What the better future feels like. What it will bring. What it will be.

No super-strong someone is coming to save us. We won’t have heroes. All we have is ourselves. We can be enough.

Inspired by:

Brennan, Natalie and Yasmine Tayag. “How to Age Up on a Warming Planet.” How to Age Up. Podcast. The Atlantic. 2025may12.

“Heather Cox Richardson on Donald Trump, MAGA and How We Fight Back.” Pod Save America. Podcast. Crooked Media.

You Understand Nothing, Robert Benson

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You probably think I’m dead. I posted a lot from 2012 to 2018. Less since 2019 and almost nothing since 2022. Yeah, there’s been a lot going on: a pandemic, an attempted coup, vandals in government, spreading fascism, unaccountable billionaires wrecking the place, changing climate, corporate rebranding of intelligence as a thing that can simulated, souped up and sold to make us all more .. productive?

I used to write with the belief that I needed share only what I felt I understood. When I stopped understanding, I stopped writing. That’s exactly backwards.

I’m sick inside my soul. Not because I stopped understanding. Because I stopped writing or I slowed down in attempt to be careful to say only things I knew for certain to be true. Problem: I know nothing for certain to be true.

We don’t write from places of perfect understanding. We write our way toward understanding.

We don’t write because our thoughts are all well-made and perfectly formed. We form our thoughts from our words. We put words on a screen or a page and say: is that what I think?

Sometimes we surprise ourselves in finding succinctly stated containers of direct thought. More often we iterate, we draft, we make paragraphs and let them cool so we can taste them in different lights at different times of day. Sometimes our thoughts are jumbled and chaotic. They don’t make sense to us. So many broken, misfit pieces. But that’s a puzzle and the only way to work a puzzle is to see the pieces, take inventory, place them into some kind of order so you can start the work of locking them together in a coherent picture.

The picture isn’t always coherent, of course. We don’t always understand what our thoughts mean. So we need to send them into the world. Let other people find them and try to connect those thoughts to their own thoughts. Sometimes they connect and someone helps us understand what we meant by what we said or what we meant to say.

All of this is to tell you, I am tired of waiting. I am tired of broken nonsense.

I understand nothing, and I am ready to tell you about it.

American Leadership?

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There are people more qualified than me to comment on the generational geopolitical fallout from yesterday’s Oval Office meeting between American President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

I was bullied a lot as a kid and, the moment Vice-President Vance jumped in, I understood what I was watching: the performance of strength without actual strength.

Every mediocre high school bully understands how to surround themselves with a few cowardly followers willing to high five each other while they take turns kicking someone who is already down.

Actual leaders support leadership. Actual leaders actually inspire other people to lead.

Virtue Signal

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Mark Zuckerberg will say I’m being performative. He will call it virtue signaling.

While throwing his parties to fit himself inside the good graces of the man who called him a loser and an “enemy of the people”.

While dismantling the apparatus of protections designed to help the most vulnerable find a place on the platform and calling it protection of free speech.

While frantically reinventing Meta in the weeks before inauguration to ensure his company has more “masculine energy”.

LOL. Performative virtue signaling.

Mood Check: T-Minus 73 Days

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If you are looking for me today, I am the middle-class white guy driving my red 2007 Prius through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting “Fight the Power” at full volume.

48 Hours: Postmortem

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After the first hot surge of nausea, the second: bilious tides of recrimination, the hottest of hot takes fill my feeds before the votes are even fully counted, before the evidence can possibly be gathered. Casting for some clear explanation, to set some simple narrative — what happened, what went wrong, what we missed. The inevitable hand-wringing, blame, second/third/fourth guessing.

I do want to understand, but not yet. I’m not ready to pull the body apart, to name the morbid conditions. I want to sit a while longer in my anger, my sadness, my surprise, my humility and confusion. I want to feel all these feelings and I want you to feel your feelings. There will be time to analyze and deconstruct, time to regather, reconnect and rebuild. Today is today. Too soon for postmortem. Too soon to hope to understand.

Billionaire Pay Day

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Just one day after the election and the billionaires have already gotten paid.

Also, please enjoy knowing the world’s richest man and the next President of the United States both own social media platforms they can use like toys.

Can’t Run But

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I haven’t run since since September 24. That was two weeks before shoulder surgery put me on the couch for six weeks with nothing to do but let muscle attach to tendon and tendon to bone. I’ve been off the couch since late November and taking walks, but I am definitely missing the mental/creative benefits that find me with a regular running practice. Which is to say, I miss the clarity of thought and writing that seems to attend with physical exertion.

I am bugging my physical therapist for a Get Back to Running date. She says sometime between mid-February (Valentine’s Day!) and end of March. That is wide zone of six weeks, but at least I now have targets on the calendar.

Being honest, I can see that I have taken my inability to run as a bit of an excuse. Instead of embracing the opportunity to walk more, I have let myself wait to be able to run.

This is a habit that shows up often in my writing. When I don’t have time to sit and fully do the thing I really want to do, I often don’t take the times that offer themselves in between things to write what/where I am able. When I tell myself “there is no time”, I am ignoring the time between things. This, I think, is the nature of practice. Working with time in a realistic rather than idealistic way.

As Paul Simon puts it in another context: “I can’t run but I can walk much faster than this.”