Pearls: There’s no going back
EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl
If you had asked me when I was in high school back in the 1990s.I’d have told you I was born during one of the most boring moments in American history. But then the world changed, and I can’t say I think much of it has been for the better.
Five years after I graduated, the 9-11 attacks happened. That was the first moment of my life when I considered – at least to any serious degree – the fact that such things could actually happen in the modern (or postmodern) world.
The election of 2004 was so boring that I didn’t even bother to vote. The differences between George W. Bush and John Kerry were negligible to me: I didn’t foresee enough of a difference between their potential presidencies to bother going to the polls. Shame on me, but it’s how secure I was that with 9-11 past us, the world had stabilized.
By 2008 we saw a full-on economic crisis facing us. By the mid-2010s, tensions originating in race returned to the foreground after years of our collective perceptions pointing toward improvements on that front.
In 2020, it was Covid-19 and the various pieces of negative fallout from the pandemic.
In 2021, we saw more than a little commotion during the transfer of presidential power. Depending on whom you ask, Jan. 6 ranks anywhere from a case of trespassing to a full-on citizen insurrection. Regardless of where you land on that spectrum, folks disputing election results doesn’t seem to be a sign of American peace and tranquility.
Now we have seen the early days of the 2024 presidential race take a downward turn, an assassination attempt of Republican leader and former U.S. President Donald Trump.
I’m obviously disturbed that anyone anywhere is taking shots at a candidate for the presidency. I’m also gravely concerned to see some of the reactions to the event.
Tons of conspiracy theories from both the left and right extremes are filling my social media news feeds. A few folks are out there applauding the violence, and some are alleging corruption – or at least incompetence – from the individuals protecting Mr. Trump.
And some folks are saying it’s a terrible event, but also kind of Trump’s fault for saying the things he says.
That’s another thing hat has changed dramatically from that ‘boring’ world of my childhood: in the 1990s, nobody was interested in hearing every single person’s ‘hot take’ on the news. Social media has duped each of us into believing that our opinions and theories on the events of the day somehow contain real information or relevance.
I don’t know about you, but when it came to the incident with Mr. Trump the other day, I was not present in the audience. Any ideas or notions of what happened on the stage I have formed from video, spoken and/or written accounts presented by others. I’m not an information source on the incident, but instead I am only a passer-on of information gathered by others.
And so are you. You pay attention to left-leaning media, and you’ll have left leaning perspectives. Same with the right-leaning reports – they put your perspectives to the right of center.
A member of my staff asked me where I get my objective news reports, and I had to be honest with her: I don’t get objective news reports – I listen to the right and to the left, and assume the truth is somewhere between.
If that gets your goat, then I apologize. I just refuse to believe that biased, partisan politicians with personal agendas and donors to protect are necessarily purely interested in serving the people’s interests. This is true regardless of party affiliations, and that’s just the way things are. There’s money to be made in politics, and if you think your side isn’t interested in it, then I’ll politely choose to disagree with you.
Well, there’s no going back to those days of my youth, I suppose, nor do I really want to do any such thing. But it sure was nicer when everybody didn’t think he or she was an expert, just because a ‘Share’ button allowed him or her to chime in on every issue that pops up.
Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.
