Support De Spite
I’ve seen it at least half a dozen times on my Facebook wall–people who will write a status asking anyone who has clicked like on things like Romney, Paul Ryan, or the GOP, to just go ahead and defriend them now. Then they’ll list the reasons why a mouse click for the political right is so offensive. I don’t disagree that a vote for Republicans, generally speaking, is a vote against reproductive rights, LGBT civil rights, and the like, because yes, the GOP’s political platform reads that they’re opposed to those rights and communities. And even if Mitt Romney himself is in favor of a “rape exception” for abortion–even if there are no health practitioners in a given area to perform an abortion because overall the climate has dampened training in those procedures–his colleagues have been arguing quite forcefully that they will continue to push legislation that outlaws all abortions no matter the mitigating circumstances. So I understand that the nuances at play in our political parties are not enough reason to absolve members of a given party from the consequences they wreak on our fellow Americans.
But I’m not jumping on the defriend bandwagon. I read the primary narrative of FoxNews as divisive, pitching conservative keyword after keyword to their faithful audience, and attempt after attempt at alienating the rest of us from watching. It’s a process wherein less and less motivation falls on FoxNews to double-check their facts and sources, until disinformation is all they telecast, reality be damned. What does it mean to live in a country where a vocal minority attempts to steep an entire political party in hate and anger, and people at the other end of the spectrum point fingers and laugh derisively or shout back in frustration? When we dismiss each other as lost causes, what are we left with? Read More…
I’ve devolved as a news-watcher over the last 25 years. If I waited until the evening to get the news, during dinner with my parents in the late 1980s, I hardly ever see broadcast news now. The promise of American 24-hour news channels never came to pass, in my opinion; instead of thorough coverage from news desks around the world, it’s mind-numbing commentary from uninformed talking heads who seem much more interested in their own product placement contracts than in communicating about our global goings on. Those news syndicates and news desks in other countries have dried up, but what was their other option after years of little funding or support from the channel executives? Now big name news outlets like CNN use amateur video–even solicit it openly–to serve as content providers. So it is that people’s backyards were frequent film footage sources during every large snow of the winter last year.
Trans/plant/portation 