PeteHappens

I’m not posting this to say: “Hey…look at the ignorance.”

Rather, I think this speaks to a few interesting things:

• There is a severe fragmentation of information: if people get there information from a specified funnel of their choosing (personal RSS readers, emails from their friends, news channels of their leaning, etc.), the only result is whole swaths of people that have a completely different reality than whole other swaths of people.  We have to admit it: the liberation of the news (Walter Cronkite —> millions of blogs) has some bad side effects. 
  
  • Individual questions at hand: how do we know the news we read is accurate?  The old trope “Read a variety different news sources” doesn’t work when your variety is “Kos, Olbermann, and DNCListServ” or “Hannity, Beck, RedState, Town Hall.”
  • Collective questions at hand: If blogs check the MSM for accuracy, who checks the blogs for accuracy?  Other blogs?
  • My inkling: the best way to do this is go back to a personal analysis of the truth— ask oneself “What is being said?  What evidence would need to be shown to prove that true?  Is that evidence being shown?”

• People have an interest in being civically active.  This is a good thing.  How do we take the extra and necessary step of making it informed civic activism.
  • Question at hand:  Can these people be civically active for something?  Or is the only way to rouse them by demonizing a person or a symbol? Many of their signs are symbolic anger: Obama/Pelosi as Devil, Hitler, etc.; Anti-Words: No “Czars,” No “Socialism”; plus the Racial/Obama-as-alien undertones.  Is this symbolic attack the only way these people care or could we rouse them against corporations or for a type of reform or for campaign finance reform or for something substanative?  Because it seems like Beck is participating in the same vagueness that many accuse Obama of (Pro-America, Anti-“Czar”, Anti-Socialism, Pro-Freedom without any substanative position on any legislation).

• These people, who are used to a politics of isolation (Fox News telling them that everyone is out to get them; talk radio telling them to hide away from the onslaught of socialism/illegals/street crime), are finding pride and joy in their togetherness.
• These people are angry at something.  And I think its some of the same things I’m mad at.  The woman that speaks at 5:14 really hit me- “And one reason I’m here today is because my grandson and if he said ‘What did you do when our country was changing?’  I said ‘I did this…I stood up.’ I don’t work any more.”  I am worried about the same things— a changing nation that needs to be helped…that needs to reclaim the values that make up its foundation.  But I think the changes that we’re worried about aren’t “Socialism” or “Obama”…the changes are the growth of rampant self-interest, the loss of community, the distancing of democracy from the many to the few, and a loss of care in Congress for the public interest.  These people want all that— they’re there because they care about the fabric of their community, they care about having a voice, they care about corruption, they wouldn’t go to a rally if they didn’t care about the public interest.  It’s just a shame that Glen Beck and Health Care Corporations have to manipulate these distinctly American passions to their private ends.

I depart with an at-least-somewhat-on-topic quote from Charles Eliot Norton on the American system and community:

“Under [the American system], the way is open for the realization of the most inspiring and most promising idea of modern Christian civilization— the true brotherhood of man, in which man shall feel himself no longer an isolated individual, but hsall find his completeness and perfection, his worth and his happiness, in the recognized relations of mutual dependence existing between himself and the community of which he forms an integral and essential part.  Without the rest of mankind he is poor, bare, solitary, and his own nature is incomplete.  With them he is rich, completed, and capable of a spiritual development of which our present civilization affords but a faint and partial type.”