Are we poised, nine days out, to make a difference? Are we ready for truth, justice, and the American way to begin the process of reclaiming the United States of America, and all of the things that it has historically stood for? If I were answering that question based solely on the polls, I would be strongly inclined to say "yes."
But, sometimes, I wonder. And coming across a story like this one certainly doesn't help.
I have long grown weary of these so-called essays that show up periodically in mainstream media, the ones in which a reporter goes off in search of the mythological "typical" American small town, far away from the "elite" coasts, where simple people leading ordinary lives, sitting around diners (and, yes, it's almost always diners, or the mall) opine about the state of America, or what they imagine America to be outside of their fifty-mile-radius view of it, or why their formerly idyllic life is no longer idyllic since everyone's move away from it.
Almost all of the people being interviewed are white. Almost all of the people doing the interviewing are white. The results, at least to me, seem to be largely examples of confirmation bias that is designed to support racial bias. If white people determined to live exclusively among white people are unhappy with the state of the world, than the world surely must be in fact going to hell in the proverbial hand-basket. And, if a white reporter is doing the listening and the writing, well, who are they to challenge the views of interviewees willing to dump an easy-to-write, easy-to-publish story.
Nowhere in any of these stories will you find any meaningful, critical examination of why these formerly thriving towns are no longer thriving. The unwillingness to deal with a changing world. The unwillingness to accept the arrival of people who wear a different complexion, or speak a different language. The adoption of politics that fail to trickle down prosperity, and instead shovel the fruits of their labors upward to the very "elites" these folks despise so much. The unwillingness to see the consequences of those politics, and to change them. And, finally, the unwillingness to see why this causes so many people to move out, to cluster among the coasts (where the money's gone, that is) in search of a better life.
It's precisely the isolation from large numbers of people, with a real variety of perspectives and life lessons, that encourage the extreme, and frankly insane, views that then end up spread on the Internet and Fox News. Isolation breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds rumors, and, the more wild and entertaining the rumors, the more likely they are to be believed by people who, thanks to the decline in our system of education, lack a foundation for challenging them.
And challenging such rumors and fantasies should be one of the most important missions of the media, and is one important reason why there is a First Amendment in the first place. Once upon a time, media outlets would produce these essays, giving their audiences the unvarnished, often ugly views that many places in the interior of our nation harbor. But they would challenge those views, and the people who hold them, in a way that no longer happens. This is in no small part because of decades of screaming by right-wing apparatchiks about "liberal media bias." As if those doing the screaming were really concerned with what the mandate of the press should be in a democracy: telling the truth.
But the mainstream media no longer challenges fantasies and rumors. It goes out of the way to confirm them. Consider the moment in the Time magazine story linked above when the reporter, challenged by an interviewee about the fact that she was wearing a mask, lowered it to her chin. To "appease" him.
To appease him?
The purpose of wearing a mask in the current crisis isn't to create an exercise in virtue-signaling. It's not to identify one's partisan politics. It's not meant to anger anyone. It's meant to save lives, regardless of the politics practiced in those lives. How many times does it have to be said: the virus can kill you, and can go anywhere to do it, and doesn't care about anybody's politics? It's a virus. It has the same imperative to live that anything else does. And its mission is to kill you, whether you take it seriously or not.
Too many of us on the blue side of our philosophical divide have forgotten how to fight. Or worse, they have become too afraid to fight. They view modern life as a negotiation, a process by which one can only run away from danger, or find a way to pargain with it.
Well, there is in fact a third way.
Fight it. And defeat.
That's what I'm aiming to do on November 3. And I hope and pray, wherever you are, that you'll join me.
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