The other day, a friend of mine reminded me that, while we’re focusing on the Israeli-imposed famine in Gaza, Israel is still sending in drones to surveil and murder civilians, as reported by numerous relief agencies and European news organizations.
What strikes me about the Sky News link above (and the video at the bottom of this piece) is the noise of the drones overhead, and the terrified children.
That noise is a constant in the lives of Gazans. My friend suggested that if Trump is elected, that noise will be a constant in the lives of certain populations in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York.
Even if no bombs drop, the relentless overhead buzz will strike terror in all of us, he argues.
It occurred to me that the drone is happening now in the U.S., but it’s of a frequency we can only feel, not hear.
We are all in a state of low-grade terror. The noise is driving us mad - sometimes literally. And it is driving us away from each other.
This, I think, is what’s behind our media obsession with Trump’s court battles, and whether any of the criminal cases will be resolved before the election.
We simply do not trust our fellow citizens - and maybe ourselves - to vote for democracy over fascism in November. We fear, I think, that too many of us will be sitting in a corner with our hands over our ears, unable to help ourselves or each other.
A court decision would ameliorate that terror. It would be a ray of sunshine through a suddenly opened window that would make us look up from our crouch, eventually stand up, and walk outside to join others.
That is what former Attorney General Eric Holder was referring to when he tweeted this a couple of weeks ago.
Holder is exhorting us to get up from our collective crouch, open our own blinds, and move ourselves out of our zombie-like state.
But it’s not easy. As I’ve written before, most people in the U.S. can’t make ends meet. Then they hear that inflation has gone down, that more people are employed, that the economy is good. But the data and the good news don’t align with their personal experiences.
Because while inflation has, indeed, gone down, and prices have, indeed, dropped from their highs of a couple of years ago, they are still higher than they were pre-pandemic.
Picture a child accidentally letting go of a balloon. It floats 20 feet up in the air, then starts to deflate. Then, as it is coming down, it gets stuck in a tree. The balloon has not come back to the child. But everyone around her is telling her that it has come “down.” And that’s good.
That child thinks the adults are lying to her.
Which is what many Americans who are sour on the economy tell pollsters. Even if their spending habits show confidence, the economy just doesn’t feel right. They are hearing a droning in the background. And they are afraid.
The Brookings Institution recently published a study on the relationship between economic reporting and negative consumer economic views. Their conclusion?
“…over the past six years, [economic news] tone has shifted more negative, with an increase in the magnitude of negative tone over the past three years.”
Brookings also notes that consumers are usually more optimistic about the local economy, but pessimistic about the national one. Which tracks, since most people get their economic news from national sources.
So, we have pessimistic economics writers, who have to couch every headline about good economic news with warnings that this good news is likely a temporary blip.
We have economics writers with smaller followings who explain that our economic policies under the Biden Administration are different from the 40 years of policies that created severe economic inequality, which have made us feel like the system is rigged for the wealthy.
But most business and economic writers at large news organizations are steeped in that “trickle-down” economics touted by Ronald Reagan, which posits that if you pay people at the top - through higher salaries AND tax breaks - then everyone below them will benefit.
Which isn’t true, and never has been true. But the orthodoxy has been so entrenched that the business journalists who have risen to the top of their fields at national outlets are convinced that supply-side economics is like gravity. It’s just a universal law.
Most Americans remember the stimulus checks we got during the pandemic. We remember that unemployment payments were increased to $1,000 a week - which was an implicit admission by federal leaders that every adult in a household needed $52,000 a year to make ends meet.
And then we saw that taken away, and heard distinguished economic leaders like Larry Summers tell us those payments caused inflation, and that the only cure was for many of us to lose our jobs.
But…
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been pointing out in his economics courses, on social media and through his Inequality Media videos that the real issue is that CEOs make more money than they pay in taxes.
And Pitchfork Economics’ Nick Hanauer has been writing and speaking for the last decade about stock buybacks, which he says are one of the main policies creating economic inequality.
Zach Silk, who works for Hanauer, has been calling out “greedflation” for the last couple of years. And the data bears him out. Corporations are making more money with fewer buyers, due to price increases not based on supply and demand, but on the knowledge that people will still buy essential goods and services, even though the price is higher.
But that artificial increase in prices? That’s the drone we all feel. That’s part of the dread we wade through in our daily lives. Every time we pay a higher price than we did four years ago, we crouch a bit more in our corners.
It’s the drone we feel when we are on social media, when we see the news of yet another mass shooting that all of us feel helpless to stop, when we see videos and read stories about children being killed in Gaza, when we hear about the death of a Russian dissident, when we meet friends and family members who believe in policies that undermine our humanity, when we see Black and trans legislators kicked out of the chambers where they work, when we see Howard University served with papers saying it can’t favor Black students, when we see the Supreme Court tell women that their bodies aren’t theirs, when we are told that corporations are people, when we can’t count on our children getting a good education, when we can’t find enough therapists to deal individually with our collective trauma, when men can’t ignore their burning desire to shout to everyone who can hear that they don’t understand Barbie.
Seriously. If you don’t understand Barbie you are contributing to the world’s cognitive dissonance.
The droning buzz is there. It makes us agitated. It makes us scared.
But I agree with Eric Holder. There is no ray of sunshine coming through our windows. We have to get up from our crouch and open the door.
Because, unlike in Gaza, the drones that are keeping the U.S. down are psychic. When we stand up and open the door, I firmly believe that many more of us will be on the other side than we have been led to believe.
I will be standing there. Consider this a greeting.
If you want, I’ll even explain Barbie to you.
Sky News Video of a drone attack:
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Bravo. I think you nailed how I am feeling. I will use your excellent balloon metaphor. Thank you for the head's up re: stock buybacks. I had no idea. The video of the children! Heartbreaking. I keep thinking too of the World Kitchen workers. The drones actually chased them down.