This Will Not Stand –

The front entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Since October 15, 1957, I’ve been fortunate to live on this amazing planet Earth as a citizen of the great country of the United States of America. When I first came out kicking and screaming in that little hospital on the Southside of Birmingham, Alabama, 63 years ago today, my parents didn’t think I was going to make it.

I weighed less than 5 pounds and had to live in an incubator for a few days. Thanks to the state of medical science at that time, I survived and went on to thrive. So I guess I have a special appreciation for science, technology and health care.

As it happened, that was the month the Russian satellite Sputnik made the cover of Life magazine, and it was the official start of the space race between the U.S. and Russia.

Now when I get a chance to camp out in an awe inspiring place like the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, I often look up at the billions and billions of stars in the sky and realize, quite humbly, that I’m just one tiny speck in the universe. In the long run of history, what I say and do probably doesn’t amount to much.

A night view of the Milky Way galaxy from Shenandoah National Park: Jane Cappe

But in my life and times, at least, I’ve been able to see and do some amazing things and make a difference in my own way. Knowing this is what sustains me, and keeps me going to fight another day for democracy and the planet.

Dog knows I’ve never been a greedy person. If I had followed the business models of others and set out to simply make a lot of money in this life, I would have taken a different path.

In the early years of the so-called conservative revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I could have followed Ronald Reagan and some libertarian philosophers I read about in college and probably gotten rich as a conservative commentator. I had the looks for television and the voice for radio back then. But I chose reporting and writing for newspapers and then magazines. I was in awe of those I read in the New York Times and magazines like The Atlantic monthly.

When I first managed to escape the redneck suburbs and study at the University of Alabama, I found my way to the Gorgas library and had to carry around a big, fat Webster’s dictionary to look up some of the words in the Times and books back then written by wordsmiths like William Safire.

Unlike some of our recent politicians who rose to power on the backs of the money of their fathers, I put in the time and did the work and read the books and learned everything I could about the world and how things work.

Working my way up and rising through the ranks and making it to the top in American journalism, the front page of the Sunday New York Times no less, and The Nation magazine, and covering politics and government as a journalist, I’ve been offended by politicians like George W. Bush. But nothing prepared me for the likes of Donald J. Trump, who has exploited the types of people I grew up with to not only rise to power, but to tear at the very fabric of our society and culture and put us on the edge of our doom.

I didn’t make it this far and come to Washington, D.C. for the past few years just to watch it all collapse and end. It has become clear that accurate words and truth don’t mean much anymore. Scholars first started studying propaganda back during World War 1, and there were dire warnings that people ignored in Germany and Europe that led to the rise of dictators like Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany.

Communications scholars in the 1990s warned that this could happen in the U.S. But I didn’t believe them. I thought we were past all of this. Surely our modern communications system was too powerful to allow authoritarianism and fascism to rise in this country, I thought. Boy was I wrong.

Of course even in the early days of the internet, a technology I embraced from the start unlike some of my colleagues in journalism and academe, I could not have predicted how Facebook and Twitter would destroy newspapers and be used to mislead the masses of people in such insidious ways.

Surely, I thought, we could also use this same technology for good to get accurate and factual information out to people. But just this week, studies are showing that misinformation is even more popular in 2020 than it was in 2016, when at least on the margins, Facebook and Twitter were the tools Trump and Steve Bannon used to trump reality and rise to power.

NYT: On Facebook, Misinformation Is More Popular Now Than in 2016

This problem and what to do about it is not over my head. I know what to do about it. I just can’t get enough people to listen and fund the solution.

How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

So we will just keep hurtling down this dangerous and curvy road like some of the mountain passes I drive through on my journey as a vagabond writer on a mission to save democracy and the planet. I hope it’s not all for naught. But I fear this story will not end well.

Just this week in Shenandoah, I sat for awhile by a campfire and talked to a smart guy named Steven who has been traveling around promoting peace and love in a van for 37 years. You might see him promoting his Catholic point of view down by the White House.

In what I call a coincidence, and he called a “coincidink,” he handed me a folder with two printed pictures in it. One was the face of John Lewis. I told him my story about knowing John Lewis. We talked for awhile at a safe social distance, and then as the night grew cool, we went about our separate ways.

In our own ways, we are back in Washington, D.C. for a few days to try to make a difference.

But the entire discussion this week all over radio, television and in every online newspaper in the land is being dominated by a woman judge who Trump nominated to the Supreme Court who will not say she will protect American democracy from Trump stealing the election. She will not answer questions about upholding the Affordable Care Act, the first law ever passed to simply regulate the private health care industry. She will not answer questions about whether she will protect a basic right of women to choose health care options for their own bodies. And she will not say whether she agrees with this most corrupt of American presidents about whether climate change is based on sound science or not.

I don’t know how it came to this, but it’s not sustainable.

It appears our only hope going forward is to throw the bum Trump out in January along with as many of his enabling collaborators as possible in the Senate and Congress. Yes, we may have to pack the court by adding new members after this election, once the Democrats gain a majority. While Joe Biden has no obligation to answer that question before the election, we will make him see the light after the election and he will get onboard.

If I have anything to say about it, we will come back from this crazy Trump debacle and live to fight another day. Just yesterday, I answered a question in a New York Times comment box about why I was voting in November.

“To save democracy and the planet, of course,” I responded. “And to stop authoritarianism and fascism from taking over America. Why else?”

How would you answer that question? What is most important to you?