Falling for it?

I haven’t put anything up for a couple of days, so here’s something I’ve been working on:

Sensationalism sells. In our entertainment, the next big thing rules. We don’t want these boring, thoughtful pieces of media – we need comic book heroes.  We need explosions and cool chases (I can’t say “car chases” anymore because a cool chase could just as much take place in a metal suit these days).

So it should only be natural that the same applies for the political environment. We need extremes… not so much for our adherence, but more so to point to the other side and say just how bad they are.

It’s a lie, and we fall for it.

There are certainly bad actors out there on both sides who would rather have it their way, no matter how much it would damage the nation. We have the right-wing ultra-nationalists, who can’t stand anything that isn’t a part of their “culture,” and we have the left-wing, ultra-liberals who seem to think any kind of cultural claim at all is an affront to their humanity. Each side is destructive. That’s what makes them so appealing to the other, because if you can have a bona fide boogeyman to which you can point, you can wallow together in the group indignation of your own little echo chamber.

I’ve seen so much of it lately. Pulling up some obscure aspect (I can’t even call it a fact) of an obscure group to get people atwitter about something – as I’ve seen most recently in an article claiming that gen Z people think the thumbs-up emoji is passive-aggressive.

I can guarantee you that they don’t.  Really. They don’t care enough about something so trivial (because they’re smart enough not to). But a tiny percentage who answered an asinine, skewed, and completely meaningless survey get turned around to “represent” an entire generation. And then the group of “news” pimps pick it up and splash it like some kind of huge deal, and the masses get riled up.

But this isn’t reality. It’s not even close. And we’ve got to do better knowing better.

I think Donald Trump’s greatest success was knowing how to exploit that aspect of our human natures. This is what I found most infuriating about his being elected, because he had some good ideas (gasp!). He had a bit of a different perspective. He shook things up and looked at problems differently. And these are all things a decent human being could have had and done too. But rather than find a decent human being who could think this way, the Republican party decided to go with a buffoon who’s biggest schtick was to go after our desire for the explosions and the chases and the comic book crap in our entertainment industry.

But don’t think this is only the purview of the Republican “party.” The Democrats are just as bad, but more subtle. I’ve written about this plenty before – it’s all about the “other” and how we can make people react to the extremes.

My biggest problem though isn’t so much that we’re stupid enough to fall for this garbage – although that’s huge. What bothers me most is that we made it through a cold war that I feel I played a small part in winning, only to lose to a group of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean hackers and bots who are playing the American people like a fiddle. Not that they need to work very hard.

I’m only asking the American people not to fall into that trap. Unfortunately…

Bonus question: Who is pictured in this post and why would I include him?