While this is hard to do, I feel that I must find some respite from the insanity that is politics right now.
Daily Kos Readers are quite aware of the news channel “Fox News Channel” so I won’t go into detail on who they are. However, they are a force to be reckoned with.
Full disclosure, I was once *dramatic pause* a Republican (Insert screaming voice here). My family lives in a red state, I grew up with that ideology surrounding me on a daily basis. I even joined the Young Republicans in high school.
Once I went to college, I started to be challenged (or brainwashed as some may put it) in what I truly believed. I didn’t like government infringing on my personal liberties, so once someone convinced me that pro-choice is an extension of that idea, I started to listen and it made more sense to me.
It wasn’t until after college and the election of Barack Obama that I started to fully form my ideas of government and it’s role in our lives. There were Democratic party platforms that I didn’t necessarily agree with but for the most part I was a Democrat.
My mother is a strong woman, she raised me and my younger sibling while my father was an over-the-road truck driver. She also helped manage the books for him. She went into tremendous debt to provide the life she thought I deserved. She was an inspiration to me and her interest in me led me to pursue college and a better life.
However, we disagreed politically on many topics. That wasn’t much of an issue until President Obama was elected. Now, instead of debating whether the Affordable Care Act was the proper way to address the healthcare crisis in this country, it was Obama going to the golf course and how he hates this country. Some of the conversations veered into soft bigotry which always when pointed out to her would elicit the phrase “You democrats always think racism whenever you precious Obama is criticize. You’re being too PC.”
This surprised me, how could this be? Well, there is something you need to know to understand how she got her.
My father became a local driver around my teenage years if not earlier. So he was home every night instead of every two weeks or month. My mother sacrificed school for a family and didn’t finish, something she implored me never to do. Now having my father back, and with me and my younger sibling growing into young men, my mother tried to find something to do. She worked in insurance, but after a few years hated it. So then she went back to school to get a certificate in nursing field. I remember being a senior in high school and watching my mother get capped and being proud of her as she looked happy that she finished. She got a job and worked for about 8 years before being laid off at her job. However, the job never made her happy. She was bulled at her job by co-workers and supervisors. She would tell me how she was picked on at work and in a few cases were documented incident reports where “fighting words”, “threats of violence” and a “hostile environment” were mentioned and she was listed as the victim. She would talk about how horrible it was to deal with catty and mean co-workers. I could understand her pain and anxiety from these incidents.
Now in her 50s, she has been unemployed for nearly 7 years. She doesn’t want to do nursing but has no clue what to do with her life. She has even tried to go back to nursing but has been out for so long that little job prospects come her way. Plus, she’s getting closer to Medicare age. She has asked “Why would an employer bother with me when they can get a younger 20 year old to do the same job?” to which I would have no reply. Essentially, the American working culture does not value her.
Downtrodden, frustrated and with no purpose in life, my mother went to the one place to find refuge. Facebook. She would (and still to this day) play Farmville. She was good at it and it made her happy. She takes care of my younger sibling who should be out of the house by now, but that’s another topic for another day. She seemed content.
Then, she started sharing those highly deceiving, if not fake, news stories around 2013 from Facebook. I would always send her to Snopes or whatever fact-checking site I could find, sometimes even linking the actual document in PDF, with highlights, showing where she was wrong. This did not deter her.
Then, she discovered Fox News. Then all hell broke loose. Constant sensationalized stories about “knockout games” or “Benghazi” were all over my News Feed. Every attempt at reason failed. This is a similar story to most anyone on a Facebook comment feed.
But things really changed after President Trump was elected, now she watches and read Facebook articles with a sense of glee to the extent that she finds joy in the Democrats’ misery. Including her own son’s.
I have moved on from the 2016 election, I am still upset at how establishment Democrats treated the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, as if he didn’t agree with anything Democrats had to say, while propping up the most unpopular Democratic presidential candidate of all time whose 30 years of political experience was a major handicap in the year of the outsider. Did I mention that I got my mom to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary? Yeah, I was pretty proud of that.
But whatever, Donald Trump is president. Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. To me, no use in complaining about how Democrats are getting screwed but instead trying to find ways to convince others that Democrats are the party of the people. But every time I try to convince my mother (who saw Bernie Sanders as a viable presidential candidate), it falls back to the evils of establishment Democrats.
It got so bad that I didn’t have Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family because of some things said to each other after the election. It wasn’t the best that both of us acted toward each other but it happened. I might have said it was some event happening but let’s just say I wasn’t super upset when I had to cancel Christmas with my family and do it in January.
Two weeks ago, I tried to bury the hatchet. Get back to a semi-normal relationship and come to an understanding because it was having an effect on my other family members. She agreed and I thought things were okay up until a few days ago.
I share a post about how Trump broke many of his promises from the campaign not only during the transition but within his 100 days of office. The first response was it has only been around 100 days, which okay that’s fine. That might seem like a reasonable response. The second response was “democrats have been nasty and obstructive the whole time.” Umm... what? So the natural response (as you have probably said in your head) was “So they are acting like Republicans treated [Democrats]? Hmm how ironic.” Then I got this message:
Democrats are the most [loud] and obnoxious group of people i have ever seen and liars and cheaters. i dont expect perfection just honest trying. I got what i wanted out of the Gorsuch! cnn is fake news and don lemon is such a cry baby. try watching fox for a week you will see video proof of everything unlike liar fake news cnn!
No attempt to see the difference, or similarities. Nope, ALL Democrats are loud, obnoxious, liars, and cheaters. Knowing that her son, who has been active with the Democratic party most of his adult life, is a Democrat STILL said those things. She claims that she is talking about Washington Democrats (which I want to work for as well) but it has never been that way.
I have great friends who are Republicans, some have been groomsmen at my wedding. They are fantastic people who I cherish. But I can’t get over the vitriol that Fox News and conservative news outlets have towards anyone who has a different viewpoint on government. Are Democrats that horrible that we aren’t even seen as individual humans anymore? Are we just these despicable, inhuman creatures incapable of any mercy or latitude? I can already feel the Trump supporter reading this paragraph laughing saying “Beta Cuck liberals” while masturbating to Alex Jones or something similar.
But what seems even worse about Fox News and the like is that it convinces people that even their own family who have different viewpoints are unworthy of any decency or civility. That they must be attacked with such vitriol only reserved for your most hated enemies because that’s who they are.
So why do I post this? Why write this long diatribe about my mother and the ways Fox News can be destructive to our world? Because I believe that the opposition to Fox News must be better.
No, I likely won’t forgive my mother for the second time because “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” applies here. That doesn’t mean I will view Republicans or people who voted for Trump with the same anger and vitriol that they show me. I doubt it will pay off, it seems decency is a forgotten language and is used against people who are trying to be decent and hold people to a higher standard than name-calling and pussy-grabbing. But hey, I guess I’m too PC to be decent.
Regardless, I understand why she might lash out at Democrats. Democrats haven’t been the greatest champion (or least communicating that they are) of the working class. Fox News gives her the perfect scapegoat for her disappointing life. Why take responsibility when you can blame anyone else? It’s an effective political strategy. I just wonder can our society survive this type of behavior for years to come? I don’t know, and that scares me.