The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS, N.C. – In all my travels, with the exception of Yellowstone, this view looking west toward Mount Mitchell is the best spot I’ve found. In some ways, however, it inspires sitting in a comfortable camp chair, staring off into space and doing nothing.

But like a dog or a newspaper, keeping a news website alive requires feeding it.

So I’m sitting here on a flawless Sunday morning at about 1,500 feet above sea level with the temperature holding in the mid-60s and wondering: If we could turn back time and change the direction of the world, where would you start the clock over?

Having already listened to the morning news on NPR and read the New York Times and Washington Post, I’m wondering when it was that the partisan divide took over our lives and made it nearly impossible for us as human beings to get together to solve basic problems?

This was not a problem 51 years ago on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. We saw the images of Earth from space and for one brief moment saw this world as home to the human race, not a divided planet where races, religions and political parties were at each other’s throats in a never-ending selfish competition.

Earth from space: NASA

Broadcast television was the new medium of mass communications of the time, and we saw how it had the power to bring us together as one people. But corruption in the U.S. administration in charge at the time quickly divided us again, like corruption always does.

By 1980 we were fighting over religion in politics again, and it wasn’t long before some people turned back to radio for news and started listening to the conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh, who made millions of dollars from advertising revenue by making it a point to divide us into tribes. Many people believed him, and fair and balanced newspapers were demonized as “liberal.” We can trace our current divided state to that moment in time.

I remember it like it was yesterday, because I was in the news business and the retail business at the time on the Southside of Birmingham. One of my best friends was a long-haired, pot smoking, hippie guitar player who had a day job painting apartments and houses nearby. He would come into my book store, newsstand and coffee shop on Highland Avenue and start raving about listening to Limbaugh on the radio. We started arguing about politics for the first time, and the divide became so great, we stopped being friends.

He went on to cut his hair, start going to church, and became not just a conservative Republican, but a Rush Limbaugh look alike. He is the one who changed his life simply because of listening to that crap on the radio. I only listened a couple of times, just enough to know that Limbaugh was totally full of shit and in the business of brain washing people and dividing us. I knew it was trouble.

Then along came 24-hour cable news. As much as I admired Ted Turner for what he did in creating CNN, the show “Crossfire” did nearly as much damage to our communications and political system as Fox News would do when it came along a few years later.

So if I could turn back time, or go back in time to change things, I would go back and see to it that Rush Limbaugh died of an overdose of pain pills. The world would be a better place.

Alas, as far as we know, there is no way to travel back in time, and even if the science fiction was true, changing things would probably have unintended consequences. Who knows, maybe Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity would have come along anyway. But there is no doubt that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch saw the success of Limbaugh and vowed to bring it to cable television. They profited while we suffered.

Everybody knows what happened after that. The country was so divided at the turn of the century and the new millennium that the United States Supreme Court handed the presidential election in 2000 to George W. Bush instead of Al Gore. Then came 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush Great Recession in 2007-2009.

We thought we had fixed things by electing our first African American president in 2008, and we had a stable period of mostly peace and prosperity there for awhile. But the forces of division on the right just grew more pissed off and stronger, ushering in Donald Trump to the White House in 2017.

In the absence of a coherent national policy strategy to deal with the global problem of pollution and climate change, we left ourselves vulnerable to the spread of a new virus. While some countries around the world have successfully stopped the spread of the coronavirus, political division has allowed it to gain a widespread foothold here and it’s not going away anytime soon.

It didn’t have to be this way. But this is our truthiness unreality now. When nearly half the population is just not interested in actual facts, and are still willing to go along with those who divide us for money and power, we are crippled in our ability to respond.

And somehow arguing about it on Facebook just doesn’t seem to help.

I can write about altruism and the selfish gene until the cows and pigs all come home dead.

Or maybe at least enough of us could listen to a former president who woke up every day in the White House for eight years and tried to say the right things and do the right things to bring us together. In another time and place, this might have worked. But we are still too divided to listen.

No matter. I’m going to quote him anyway.

In delivering online video commencement speeches to high school and college graduates on Saturday, former President Barack Obama said some of the right things again, unlike the current occupant of what used to be called “the peoples’ house.”

“This pandemic has shaken up the status quo and laid bare a lot of our country’s deep-seated problems — from massive economic inequality to ongoing racial disparities to a lack of basic health care for people who need it,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s woken a lot of young people up to the fact that the old ways of doing things just don’t work; that it doesn’t matter how much money you make if everyone around you is hungry and sick; and that our society and our democracy only work when we think not just about ourselves, but about each other.”

” … if the world’s going to get better, it going to be up to you,” he said to the young people who will from now on be known as the coronavirus generation.

“With all the challenges this country faces right now, nobody can tell you ‘no, you’re too young to understand’ or ‘this is how it’s always been done.’ Because with so much uncertainty, with everything suddenly up for grabs, this is your generation’s world to shape,” he said, breaking his advice down into three main points.

“First, don’t be afraid. America’s gone through tough times before — slavery, civil war, famine, disease, the Great Depression and 9/11. And each time we came out stronger, usually because a new generation, young people like you, learned from past mistakes and figured out how to make things better,” he said. “Second, do what you think is right. Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.”

“I hope that instead, you decide to ground yourself in values that last,” he said, “like honesty, hard work, responsibility, fairness, generosity, respect for others.”

“And finally,” he said, “build a community. No one does big things by themselves. Right now, when people are scared, it’s easy to be cynical and say let me just look out for myself, or my family, or people who look or think or pray like me. But if we’re going to get through these difficult times; if we’re going to create a world where everybody has the opportunity to find a job, and afford college; if we’re going to save the environment and defeat future pandemics, then we’re going to have to do it together. So be alive to one another’s struggles. Stand up for one another’s rights. Leave behind all the old ways of thinking that divide us — sexism, racial prejudice, status, greed — and set the world on a different path.”

Read the full address here

Watch one of the videos here.

And by damn stop paying attention to the partisan divide on cable TeeVee and let’s find a way to pull together and save ourselves on planet Earth.