Political Detox

One of the things I've had to do without while on the trail has been news. At home, I'm pretty much a news junkie; hitting news and political blogs nearly every day, listening to talk radio or NPR in the car, leaving cable news on while walking around the house. I've pretty much been in detox out here, catching a newspaper or getting online once a week or so just to see what I'm missing.

Except that I haven't really missed anything. When you're a news junkie, you follow every little "controversy," every back-and-forth, every point or two of "movement" in the incessant polls as if they actually meant something vitally important. In reality, most of what's happened in the last five months has been fairly predictable, and I don't think many people would change their votes according to all that stuff anyway.

But the thing that sticks out the most when you dip your toe back into the media after being away from it is how hysterical people get. You listen to the TV news or go online, and you get the impression that the election this November is between a socialist demagogue who wants to surrender to the UN on the one hand, and a fascist warmonger who wants to euthanize the poor on the other. It's really absurd, and it certainly drives home the point that the one bias pretty much all media have in common is the bias that whatever they are talking about is IMPORTANT. Not that any of this is new - American politics were rabidly partisan in 1790; in some ways political discourse is more restrained now than it's ever been. But that doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous.

Every election year since I've been teaching, I've told the same story to my students to try to give them perspective. I went to a very conservative College, where probably 80% of the student body were registered Republicans. On the night of the 1992 election, I was walking around campus, and as the results came in, there was a palpable sense of despair; so much so that the next day in chapel, the school president felt the need to reassure people that the election of Bill Clinton did not call into doubt the existence or omnipotence of God.

When I got into my dorm room, I found my roommate listening to George Bush's concession speech on the radio. My roommate was not a US citizen, but a Liberian who had escaped that country's civil war and enrolled in college in the US. Despite (or perhaps because of) that, he was very invested in the election and an ardent Bush supporter. But when I saw him, I was stunned to find him not at all depressed at the result of the election; normally very low-key, he was positively giddy as he listened to his candidate admit defeat and praise his opponent. I was thinking he was misunderstanding what was going on; until I realized that I was the one unclear on the concept.

John was thrilled just to see a peaceful change of power. Having lived his whole life in West Africa, he, like 99% of the people in the history of the planet, had never seen a person in political power willingly give it up. What I took as a given was to him a source of wonder.

The point I make with my students is that, as much as the politicians and the talking heads want to convince us that the apocalypse will come if we elect the wrong guy, the reality is that checks and balances, as well as politicians' desire for re-election, ensure that the vast majority of what happens will be things that the vast majority of us can go along with. No matter what happens in any American election, 99% of us will find our lives 99% unchanged. That's a good thing, one that's easy to forget when you watch TV more than once a month.