Ten days before I turned 5, I rushed to the TV in our house at the appointed time to watch my favorite show, “Leave It To Beaver.”
But it wasn’t on. Instead, it was the news.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with the news. We watched it every night, at IT’s appointed time, as men with deep voices intoned about death.
Five hundred people killed one day. A thousand the next. I couldn’t count that high, nor do I think I understood the meaning of the numbers. But I understood my mother’s dismayed reaction to them.
I learned new words that I also didn’t understand, except that they were connected to the numbers. Viet Cong. Hanoi. Tet.
Tet was a holiday, my mother told me. Like Chanukah. And yet the bad guys had attacked us.
Us.
“Why isn’t Beaver on!?” I asked/complained to my mother.
“They took it off for tonight so the news can be on,” my mother answered.
“Why?” My favorite word.
“Because they killed Martin Luther King.”
“The news people killed Martin Luther King?”
Everyone laughed. I think it relieved their tension.
But it didn’t relieve mine.
When we talk about people being “a child of the ‘60s,” we’re usually referring to Baby Boomers, who came of age in the ‘60s. There was a lot of self-invented nomenclature that infantilized people whom I saw as adults. Wild Child. Flower Child.
But to people who were really children during this time - the latter part of Generation Jones, the first part of GenX - our childhoods were shaped by war and bombings, protests and riots, and popular culture about death, drugs and sex.
I developed a pit of existential dread that I never truly identified till high school. And that I never fully got rid of.
That is the dread I feel now, but in a much deeper, profound and scary way than I did as a child.
This is the dread that is underpinning the psychological precariousness of our young people, who are, on the whole, much more serious, much more anxious, and much more sober than their Boomer counterparts were at the same age.
The people who immerse themselves in distractions… those are the people I worry about. The people who pay more attention to their favorite fictional TV show than to the very real peril we are facing… terrify me.
“I just can’t watch the news anymore.”
I would be a very wealthy person if I had a dollar for everyone who has said that to me in the last 15 years.
“I understand,” I continually answer. “But you can’t NOT pay attention to the news. We all have to pay attention.”
What I really meant was “we all have to pay attention to the truth,” and my naïveté at being a journalist who, up till 2011, ran my own newspaper, had me believing that most of my fellow journalists cared about truth.
For the most part - as I learned in the land of public radio - journalists care more about both sides, even if one side is lying. They care more about watching their back and not getting sued. Journalists, like Fundamentalist Christians, have twisted our creed of “objectivity” to protect the way we see the world, not guide how we challenge the world.
Which is why I was both horrified and gratified at this NY Times piece on why people who support Vice President Kamala Harris might vote for Trump.
In particular, this quote, from a 21-year-old from Las Vegas, took my breath away.
“Most of all, she said, she strongly supports abortion rights — and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him. Ultimately, despite her misgivings about the economy, support for abortion rights would probably be what decided her vote.” (Emphasis mine)
The Times describes this person as a “financial analyst,” but I don’t know how you become a financial analyst at the age of 21.
Other people interviewed in this piece said they preferred Trump to Biden because Trump gave them money when the pandemic happened. They were completely unaware that Biden, too, gave them money. And that Biden raised the Child Tax Credit to benefit more families. Which Congressional Republicans stopped.
These people were surprised when interviewers corrected them, which, I gotta say, is a huge journalistic step forward. When you move away from stenography and engage in discussion, you are not just enlightening your subject, you are exploring the deeper reasons they feel the way they do.
There is too much going on in the world right now to bury ourselves in our own private “Leave It To Beavers.” There is too much at stake, too much on the brink, for us to ignore the truth, and the reporting of it.
Trump’s Shadow
There has been so much news this week, on so many different subjects, that my head is spinning. It’s all big news. And it’s important that we pay attention.
First and foremost is the ongoing story of how Donald Trump plans to weaponize the federal government to go after his enemies should he be reelected. This includes, as Joyce Vance and Heather Cox Richardson have pointed out, judges who have held him to the rule of law, prosecutors like Jack Smith and Fani Willis, even his former staff members, like Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly, who served as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as Trump’s Chief of Staff, respectively, in an effort to become “the adults in the room” who would deter him from his worst impulses.
Let’s be very clear: a second Trump presidency will jail the people who previously stopped him from his worse impulses, and we will cease to be a democracy.
I wonder if the 21-year-old financial analyst understands this.
Trump is saying this out loud, to everyone who will listen. Like Univsion, which has suffered backlash from its fawning interview with Trump. And to a crowd in New Hampshire, in which he referred to his “enemies” as “vermin.”
This is Hitleresque. But I somehow doubt the guy who liked getting subsidies from Trump but didn’t understand what Biden has done even knows that Hitler used the same term.
The Economist Magazine, though, does understand the danger of Trump, with a stunning cover image this week showing how his presence - and the U.S.’ ignorance - casts a shadow over the world.
Israel and Hate
Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff addressed the both-sideism of anti-Israel and pro-Israel protests in his November 15 column dispelling the myths of the Israel/Hamas war. Kristoff wrote that neither side is completely right or completely wrong.
“Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.”
Other stories about Israel that caught my eye this week are the impassioned plea of a woman whose children were taken hostage (I would feel the same way); stories about how U.S. officials and Congressional staff are vocally disagreeing with U.S. policy on Israel; a piece by Times reporters who embedded with Israeli troops in Gaza to report on the estimated 5,000 deaths of kids, quoting one doctor who characterized the constant bombings as “a war against children.”
I will also point out that if Trump were president, government officials and Congressional staff would not be allowed to protest. They would be jailed if they dared.
There is also the news, posted late Saturday, that the Biden Administration has brokered a limited cease-fire and the imminent return of women and children who were taken hostage on October 7. This may be because families of hostages walked across Israel to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and demanded that he “just look us in the eye.”
We will see what comes to pass.
Or give one-time support, or support at a different monthly level through Ko-Fi.
Biden let states pass abortion bans? We really are doomed. There is no defense against an electorate with the attention span of a gifted gnat when it comes to political life. It’s not that people are any stupider than they have ever been. We all get pretty much the same daily allotment of neocortex processing time as we ever have. What’s changed, I think, is what that time is given over to. The young financial analyst, given decades of job title inflation, might be directing most of her time to being a data entry clerk getting spreadsheet totals to foot correctly. Besides, the adolescent neocortex isn’t fully wired up until around 25. From an adult perspective, it could be argued that the demographic is somewhat less equipped for sanity than their elders. Not that we have covered ourselves in sufficient glory to be held out for emulation.
It’s trite to say that geriatrics think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket is simply the sour grapes reflection that we, ourselves, are already close to the Last Exit Interview. Some merit to that. With my own 12-14 in remaining actuarial I don’t plan on wasting too much hope looking for things to stop getting worse before I die.