Just When You Think It's Safe....

I have a cousin, Cindy, who is mixed-race.  She recently posted on her Facebook wall, "Trump is a bitch if you like him unfriend me."  And, because she and I are friends, I got to see what *her* friends said to her.... a LOT of Cindy's friends voted for Trump.  

Their responses to her range from "I live in coal country..." and basically have a sincere belief Trump was a better choice for our economy to posting YouTube videos entitled "Christianity Mind Control and Its Terrifying Power Over Believers" with a nonsense post that goes like this, "queen England and Hillary needs to stay in the devils democracy of the devils England the terrorist MuslimsChristianity Mind Control and its Terrifying Power Over Believers and wake up." (I don't even know how to parse that. And I have no idea how it relates to the argument at hand.)

At least one person felt free to use the c-word to talk about Hillary Clinton (several used the term "Killary") and the sheer amount of misspellings and misinformation is staggering.

I look at this and get several conclusions:

Fox News and its radio talk show affiliates are to blame for a lot of this.

We need a better educational system in this country.

And, possibly, America is legitimately doomed.

...

On that last one, I try to remind myself that 1.5 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than did for Donald Trump.  That may not save us, however.  I don't see how, given the reality of the next four years we can dismantle the things that spread this kind of hate and misinformation. If anything, it's likely to get much, much worse.

When people try to compare what's happening now to what happened in any other time in American history, one of the pieces that is missing is the fact that the news used to actually report facts.  Even back in the darkest days of the 1960s, the news was still a source of INFORMATION.  Opinions were still strictly kept to the editorial sections.  Now entire "news" channels lie on a regular basis and claim to be the "antedate to the 'liberal' media."  There are people out there who think scientific facts are debatable or subject to the will of their god.  Some of them are now in charge of key positions in this country.

The problem with 'reaching across the aisle" to the people like the ones on Cindy's feed is that the truth has been well insulated from them for years now. If you present them with a fact, they will tell you that you have "liberal bias" and counter with some kook report they read on Brietbart.

Back when I was young, I used to think about Republicans as "the loyal opposition."  They were people who believed differently from me, but who still used the same facts as I did to base their arguments on. We could agree to disagree, because, at the foundation, there were common facts and figures.  The real difference between us was actual opinions on the same set of truths, facts, science, etc. 

This no longer seems to be the case.