Our country’s in a fix that’s hard to comprehend, even if you’ve paid attention to current events all of your life. And it’s a challenge to not run melancholy mad.
It’s surreal that a country founded by people who fought eight years for their independence from a king is now threatened by a large minority that supports a convicted felon who would be a dictator.
Try as you might, you’d never be able to make that up. It sounds too ridiculous, too implausible, too impossible to be believed.
Yet, here we are.
Naturally, rational minds have tried to figure out how we got to such a pathetic, deeply frustrating, infuriating state. Less rational minds grasp at sound bite slogans that seem to make sense even if they’re lies.
And it’s hard to reach people who support the felon because they willingly inhabit the Alternate Facts Universe. They get their information, such as it is, from biased media and nut-job cable TV talk show and talk radio people who enjoy stirring the pot of right-wing conspiracies whether they believe them or not because it’s fun, and lucrative. It’s a real challenge to break through the conservative propaganda to have a conversation with AFU inhabitants.
Some people can manage it; like Gretchen Whitmer. And more people need to pay attention to how she does it so we can start to re-unite our country and work together to solve the grave challenges we all face.
Meanwhile, rational minds have to persevere day-by-day in this period of unreal division until we manage to keep the White House in the sane hands of a responsible leader worthy of the post. And in so doing build the majority in the Senate and gain the majority in the House to achieve an actual functioning government and throw an ethical lasso around the Supreme Court.
So how can a rational person retain sanity and a grip on optimism down here in the trenches?
One thing that really helps is to NOT pay too close attention to the daily political clown show. Why start your day disturbed and angry? That’s not healthy.
Pay attention to the headlines and read/listen to details as warranted, but tune out most of the talking heads even in responsible news media. That’s much easier to do when you’ve long since decided that rather than vote for a convicted felon to lead the free world, you’d vote for the local dog catcher is he’s a man of integrity and honor. With that decision made, who needs to hear what the felon said or did lately?
Another thing that helps is a bit of gallows humor like that employed by combat veterans. For example, when some ‘pundit’ says that law enforcement’s still trying to figure out the motive of the young man who tried to rid the world of the felon, just shake your head in amazement that anyone could be that clueless. When a German officer tried to blow up Hitler, did anyone have to wonder what his motive was?
And if you were a Secret Service agent and they tried to assign you to protect the felon, wouldn’t that be your last day in that job? Talk about a conflict of interest!
But even just skimming the news can lead to a grin sometimes. For example, when the felon’s vice presidential choice has a quote surface from his past in which he wrote: “I hate the police.” that gives the lie to any law-and-order bloviating he may do. But on the other hand, he certainly adheres to the high level of hypocrisy in the GOP.
In any case, it’s always worthwhile to hold the New York Times editorial board to account. When they ran an editorial apparently based on the premise that the GOP has equal standing with the Democratic party despite the fact that only the latter stands for upholding the democracy readers rightfully jumped on ’em. Clearly the board’s torn between the need to sell newspapers and the need to prevent a catastrophe in November. Maybe they find it too uncomfortable to acknowledge that a free press will be the first to go in a dictatorship?
However, disappointing as the Times editors can be, the paper remains an important source for fact-checked news and reporting. As does the Public Broadcasting Service NewsHour, which itself can be irksome. In their effort to appear unbiased, which is laudable to a large degree, there still remains a boundary, a limit which often gets tested. That usually results in this observer muting the sound when 45 or 45 supporters are inflicted on viewers. The closed captioning can give you the gist, and then you can tune that out, too.
In the end, is there a risk in being selective with information in-take? Maybe if you tune out for days at a time. But in this consumer’s view the health benefits certainly outweigh the risk when you remain reasonably conscientious, and support the Democrats every way you can.
