The Witness Chronicles, May 4, 2024
Balance in the news and the Palestine protests
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The Challenge of Balance and Where It Is Problematic
How do you legitimately compare Trump and Biden?
This is a journalistic quandary, to appear unbiased when facts are so wildly out of balance. Or is it? The election polls show a country evenly split between the two political camps. But we are not talking about a radical right vs a radical left because Joe Biden is very consciously sticking closer to the moderate center.
Trump, on the other hand, is doubling down on his extreme threats to democracy as we know it, threatening very directly to destroy many constitutional freedoms, including threatening the free press when they disagree with him or report on his actions.
Yet journalists are supposedly fair and balanced, meaning they have to find equivalence between a moderate, forward looking old school politician in Joe Biden and an indicted defendant who claims election fraud, is appearing daily in court for sleazy actions allegedly taken to help him get elected in 2016, and who will pardon convicted violent criminals who tried to overthrow the government of the United States, at his direction.
I am not a journalist and I see nothing fair and balanced about these two positions, which is why I write opinion and observation views that are my own. To me, simplistically, this is a clear good vs evil conflict between democracy and autocracy, and between intentional ignorance and violence, and actually governing.
But it is not just these two very different views of the country’s future. It is the Republican/MAGA’s willingness to encourage the apathy of many voters and to lie and spread hatred among those who see themselves as victims. On many levels this apathy scares me the most because it extends to any unpleasant aspect of life.
Just ignore it or deny it and maybe it will go away. Take a look at the current weather news this week. It is insane with flooding, hundreds of very violent tornados and a projected hurricane season including as many as 33 named storms, any one of which could destroy an entire city.
Climate change, in other words. Yet an entire party is led by a man who could care less about tackling an enormous world threatening issue like that. He knows that doing nothing won’t affect his future. He won’t be here long and he is insulated by money. So he doesn’t give a damn.
Btw, like all deniers and ignorers, he obviously could care less about the future of his kids or grandkids. Big surprise.
That one issue, climate change, should keep anyone under the age of sixty from voting for the far right and Mr Trump. I’m a boomer and will not live to see the future beyond a few decades from now but I still care. Maybe I’m wrong and should just live for today.
What is balanced between Biden and Trump? Nothing that I can see. There is simply no logic in comparing the two, as though they are somehow comparable. But I know ‘legitimate’ media like the NYTimes and the Washington Post have an editorial imperative to give equal coverage.
The problem is, this skews reality, encouraging notions like ‘all politicians are the same’ which the apathetic use as an excuse for not thinking. But the future is whacking us on the head trying to get our attention. A lot of change is coming whether we care or not.
This balance and phony apathy thing is a lot more dangerous than these words can convey. If you live in a coastal zone, a forest, or Tornado Alley (which is moving east), you can be concerned or you can pretend it won’t happen to you, even as it does to your neighbors.
This denial is encouraged by the right, because it’s exploitable via large media (Fox) that feels no imperative to be truthful or balanced, though they pretend to be fair and balanced. It’s a real problem in American society. Call it willful ignorance and Trump and his people know they can exploit it.
This is the battle a lot of us see as critical to the future of human society. It’s why I write (it’s certainly not the money, which is pitiful). Even though I may not live through the most dire consequences of something like climate change, I still see it as my issue because it is an issue for all of us.
I think what it all comes down to is this: is anyone paying attention? The scary answer seems to be, largely, no. And that is what the Trump campaign is counting on. An uninformed public that doesn’t care and votes on a whim, or because someone told them something.
Think about it, seriously for once. This is the near future we are talking about, our future.
Contemplating the Pro Palestine Protests
This generation’s anti-war voices and problems
In 1968, when I was thirteen years old, I was tear gassed. I’d skipped school and taken a bus downtown to go to an anti-war protest against our involvement in the war in Vietnam. There were perhaps a thousand protesters, mostly college students, and we sat in the middle of our busy Main Street and blocked traffic, peacefully.
But in the windows of surrounding buildings were men with cameras with long lenses photographing individuals in the crowd and police were massing down the street. Without action by us, suddenly there was the popping of tear gas launchers and canisters landing among us. I ducked into the doorway of a department store, but not before getting a nose full of the intensely irritating gas.
Other things happened that afternoon, including an officer with a custom made white Billy club four feet long, beating the hell out of a kid and sending him to the hospital. That kid turned out to be the son of a prominent local judge and in a miracle of justice for that time, the rogue cop was fired.
It turned out he had a long internal record of violence that had been covered up for years. Some things never change.
Fast forward to now, 2024, like 1968 a charged political year, but so far no assassinations of leaders like RFK Sr and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Today we see echoes of those past times with students in the streets and on campuses protesting the brutal war in Gaza, and now the West Bank, against Palestinians and the Hamas terrorists among them. An estimated 30,000 are dead, a majority women and children.
Some of the parallels are striking. Both years are contentious presidential election years in the US. Israel has a warmonger, possibly corrupt political leader in Netanyahu, who has escalated the war in Gaza far beyond any necessary or humane level, starving its citizens, and destroying the entire fabric of Palestinian society.
In 1968 we were to see Richard Nixon elected, a warmonger and corrupt politician. His unnecessary carpet bombing of the Vietnamese helped him get elected, and then eventually turned against him along with his own corruption scandal.
The war started in response to a vicious day of terror by Hamas against Israeli citizens, characterized by slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of hostages. The day ended with 1200 Israeli citizens dead and over 200 hostages taken. Retaliation was fast, indiscriminate, and brutal. And it has remained that way for over six months.
The historical roots behind this run very deep, going back at least a hundred years in modern times and thousands in the history of the region. But things are different this time. Netanyahu’s motivations are extremely suspect. He is very unpopular among his own people and stands to face corruption charges if forced to resign.
He is also a right wing extremist who refuses to acknowledge the Palestinian’s right to a sovereign state of their own, on land they have lived on and worked for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The result of this is the constant existence of vengeful groups that use terror and hate to protest their people’s plight. Or so they claim, though it appears they really just hate Jews and want to exterminate all of them.
Netanyahu has exploited that after Hamas gave him an opening with their October 7 slaughter of innocents. It looks like he and his lieutenants saw a way to hold onto to power in the face of almost certain removal from the protections it affords them. The result was crimes against humanity and today’s protests here in the US, despite Israel being a staunch ally since its inception after WWII.
It took years for the events of 1968 to change things and many thousands of American and Vietnamese deaths. In the end that war was lost by the US, a fact that many on the right have a hard time admitting, in part because it would mean admitting it was all for nothing.
Most wars, seen in the light of history, are for nothing in the end. The Israeli Palestinian war will only have meaning if there is the creation of Palestinian state, a difficult if not impossible goal, especially when the Israeli leader rules it out.
You might ask, what is the point of writing this? I’m doing it in part because it helps me to sort out the why of these things, but the why ultimately eludes me. The sad thing is the realization that politicians on both sides use war as a tool to remain in power and to increase that power. There are men and women, mostly men, who are willing to make that trade off of innocent lives for personal greed and power.
It has always been so. The only possible route to change may lie in those protests by idealistic youth who see the world in black and white terms of good and evil. Naive maybe, but their actions may create change on some level, though it may take years to come to fruition.
Do I agree with them? Some and some not, because there is nothing black and white about it. Ask President Biden, as he tries to navigate between our historical support for the state of Israel and his outrage at the actions of its military under a desperate and unpopular leader.
So, for me personally, I remember the convictions I had as a young man, convictions that are now tempered by what I know of history and human nature. But I can’t fault the convictions of young protestors who will live with the reality of now for years to come.
They have the right to protest, something I would still fight for, but not the right to hate. You cannot beat hate with hate, a lesson we never seem to learn.
~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen.
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