Opinion/Editorial
The Wounded Bull
What really happened to cause this great gaping divide strung across the USA like some weird form of the Grand Canyon, but in reality, a thing of the mind. Of belief. Belief is the coming to a conclusion about trust, faith, and confidence that something, or a collection of somethings, is the truth. What happened to mankind, not just the USA, was, and remains radio and television. In the early days of both of those inventions, what was broadcast, save for some flights of fancy like espoused by Orson Wells and the Mars invasion, was mostly homologated truth delivered regularly to the public.
Those of us old enough can remember sitting in the living room within inches of the single home radio and then glued to the three television channels offered by the networks. Who, from that time, can ever forget Cronkite, or Morrow, or later William Buckley or, later still, Peter Jennings? We believed. And we were mostly right in our belief that what we were getting was mostly if not all, of the truth as other people were experiencing it and then delivering it directly to us. When Fox and MSNBC came in, one booming out a discourse of mostly fantasy conspiracy theories, and the other rage against anything republican, the messages began to change. Soon, everyone wanted to be in the ‘news’ business. It was concluded, correctly, that changing the facts without admitting to changing them slanted the belief systems of the people watching.
Voila! Spectrum news, brand new, comes onto my television whenever it’s been off for a while. I have to immediately change the channel, not because of their version of the news, but because of my own anger at being put upon and controlled like that. Facebook is into presenting the news. Amazon is into the news business too. I mention all this because I am aghast to have been here to observe the change in my fellow human beings occupying all different parts of my country. We, as a population, were noted for our stubborn, skeptical, and ‘show me’ attitude about everything. We didn’t trust any leader, the one we voted for included.
So, what happened?
Why are so many people treating Donald Trump as if he’s the returned Jesus Christ? He looks awful, acts awful, and says insane things. Most of his followers agree with that. He changed mostly all the jobs in Washington, it’s true, but the people he put in charge have almost all gone by the wayside one way or another. Why is this man being followed to the point of so many of my fellow countrymen wanting to take up arms to defend him being put back into office in January even if he didn’t earn the vote and support of the majority? Why do they want to kill for this man? It’s because they came to believe. Not only him but a bunch of mostly uncredentialled circus barker, supporting him, as well. They came to believe because of how the presentation of mass media in television, radio, and much of the Internet came to and has come to, accepting lying to the public as being quite okay.
The most successful media outlet (Fox) on television and the largest (Clear Channel) broadcast that Biden is a socialist. These stations equate socialism as communism, without ever explaining any of it. Even Facebook and YouTube, and now Parler, all lean heavily to the right although the public, in general, is at least sixty percent liberal. That’s the effect of mass media today and it’s not likely to change. My rural neighbors have become much more guarded, angry, silently bellicose, and sometimes downright nasty because my newspaper leans heavily left.
What happened to my countrymen and women? How did they become so easily led? And how did I become like a lost soul wandering among them, afraid that I may be called back into that awful dangerous and miserably cauldron of charnel-house combat? I do not want to see those around me suffer in such pain, and I especially do not want them to suffer over stuff that is simply not true. Trump has convinced so many that since he is in such pain over losing that his supporters must share that pain too. Trump will move on, but we have to continue along with one another. Let’s attempt to force the news to become the news again and not some set of organs connected to fictionally scripted reality shows.
