I was raised in a bubble. A conscious, deliberate, religious bubble. There was a definable and impermeable line between inside and outside. Between us and them. Between their teachings (wrong) and our teachings (right). Between good (us) and bad (them).
I lived the bubble thing until I was almost forty. Now I am shocked and frightened by how new technologies have cast the entire population into bubbles, how algorithms hold us in their grips and how individuals like Charlie Kirk, and others, create realities and reinforce walls around their constructions that make total sense to the insiders and sound like complete fabrications to outsiders.
I broke out of my religious bubble when I finally was able to see the bubble for what it was and for how it worked. It was a life-changing, a world-shattering experience. It took me years to be a comfortable outsider.
In my religious bubble we were taught as young people how to argue. We did role playing exercises. I liked being them. I loved to challenge our side with their arguments. I could debate with the best of them. It was my sporting event. I would have taken on Charlie with glee. Sparring with him to prove my points. It was all about making points. I would have been unphased by his put downs and bullying. I would have seen them for what they were—strategies for making points.
There was only one rule in our religious debates. The arguments had to stay inside the bubble. We couldn’t bring in outsider information. That was easy because, at the time, none of us knew much information from the outside. We were not encouraged to read outsider books or visit outsiders’ homes. Education was not encouraged. Many of us didn’t have television. My father believed it would poison our minds. We went to outsider schools, but we weren’t allowed to take part in outsider activities. No dress-up at Hallowe’en. No standing for the national anthem or God Save the Queen, something that happened at every assembly. I remember in grade three there were two of us who were not allowed to colour Christmas pictures of Santa Claus and decorated trees. A Jewish girl and me. We were given old, mimeographed colouring pages of fall leaves and pumpkins.
Our arguments. Our proofs. Our debate fodder had to come from inside our religion’s very narrow understanding of the Bible. The Bible was the only source material. For instance, if a discussion was about creation, Genesis was the source. Seven days from start to finish. Man had dominion over other created things. Woman was created from man and was to be subservient to him. No questions. It was meant to be. God-decreed. We were mere humans. It was not the created’s place to question the creator. Or to question the men who had decided what the creator meant by the things that were written in the Bible.
Thinking back, I can’t imagine how our arguments went on for so long given how little source material we were dealing with. Yet I saw myself as a radical. I questioned everything. From inside the bubble. I could only devise questions from inside. I had no other information. I was inside a locked drum, an eco chamber.
Then I started having dreams, awake and asleep dreams, of brick walls falling around me. Images of Coventry, England, which I visited in 1970. It looked like the war had taken place the day before. I was haunted by scenes of decay.
At the same time, as if someone had stuck a pin in my bubble, I began to hear voices from the outside. At first, I began to think about injustices to indigenous peoples differently than before. “What sort of God would set up a system like colonization? What sort of God would let it go on for centuries?”
Then God himself began to shake. And Jesus. Then Abraham, Issac and Jacob. The second coming. The judgement. They all became stories, metaphors, along with all the other spiritual stories and metaphors from outside of the bubble. I became physically sick as I grieved the loss of the world I once knew and that I once believed to be true.
I’m thinking about that bubble more and more as I see bubbles being constructed seemingly out of reinforced steel, not shimmering dish soap. Pins are going to have a hard time poking holes in our modern bubbles. It appears people are willing to fight for the right to live in their bubble.
While I once thought that I had escaped the bubble world altogether I realize I have moved into, or, more appropriately put, have been cast into, another bubble. The radical left, woke, Antifa, socialist bubble…apparently.
The other day a young man excused what he thought was my ignorance because as he said, “You have been indoctrinated by extreme left-wing media and you don’t even know it.” I have been told that it’s no wonder I think like I do because I have been brainwashed by the western education system. As someone, who used to be a close friend, said, “I read the stuff you post in your blog and I think, oh my, you need the right information.” Information from inside her bubble, I’m assuming.
So here I am again. This time pigeon-holed in a bubble not of my choosing. Frustrated because I thought I had moved on to a more enlightened world. Deflated because I had naively believed such a world existed. But still passionately imagining a way to live in a peaceful, non-dogmatic world where we respect and appreciate each other, where we find our differences interesting rather than threatening and where we interrogate our own sources with the same doggedness as we apply to others.