Maybe I chose my words poorly. It’s more of a divided media I was getting at and how this is used to create a divided people. I think people are mostly on a spectrum of ideas but they are often only presented with two choices in the two-party system in the United States.
I feel absolutely horrible for the people who are faced with a uncertain and possible very dangerous future.
We should absolutely speak out against planned injustice towards them.
But I also think part of what we need to do is dispel the myths that some people have been constantly fed that we’re sub-human monsters deserving of our fate. That message has to get out.
I don’t disagree with that. Rather I want you to consider what that divisiveness really is. Because as I tried to explain in my link, when you echo that it is a problem of polarization between two extremes you are getting things dead wrong. There are far more serious breaks in America we need to be worrying about.
Can we at least agree that the message of left-wing media doesn’t reach the right wing, and the right-wing media paints the left wing in the least flattering light it possible can?
Ultimately what I’m trying to say is that for some people, they’ve only heard the worst about you and there isn’t anyone or anything in their circle of information that gives them a different perspective on who you are.
Part of the reason cartoons and even some movies put helmets on the bad guys is that you don’t feel bad when they get killed or bad things happen to them. Essentially, I think the right-wing media has spent the last eight years if not longer putting helmets on left-wing supporters. If you’re able to get that helmet off, it just might be jarring enough that they’ll regret doing the worst things they plan on doing.
So, the right-wing media says mean things about the left-wing and that puts a helmet on the left-wing. It is therefore the left-wings job to remove the helmet by not talking mean.
That sure is my experience. One of the clearest examples is the use of the phrase “fly-over country.” I’ve lived in the mid-west and both coasts and the only times I’ve ever heard that phrase was from people on the right projecting how they imagine people on the coasts view them. Its practically a persecution complex.
Just last night I was watching PBS Newshour and they had a variety of people in a sort of round-table discussion of the election. And right on cue, the most right-wing person there (which, being PBS wasn’t foaming at the mouth right-wing, but still surprisingly shouty) started in with how DC is disconnected from “fly-over country.”
Not terribly likely in my experience. For many of them, “humanity” is a zero-sum game. If we are also human, then they are less so, and they are so committed to and integrated with the concept as part of their own intrinsic identity that attempting to convince them otherwise can and will be seen as an attack on their own conception of self.
Someone needs to take this moron’s Twitter account away. Alternately, anyone who has a brain in his/her head should ditch their own Twitter account. If they lose half their users, their ad revenue will crash, and they can be bought up by Eddie Lampert to add to his winning portfolio.
Trump keeping hold of his Twitter account would be the best possible thing for putting the lie to all of his attempts at normalization. Let him showcase how duplicitous and petty he is.
