Things have to change

According to Ezra Klein and Alvin Chang in Vox.com, only 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they would be upset if their son or daughter married someone affiliated with the other political party in 1960. Today, 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats say they would be distressed by a politically mixed marriage. In study after study, political scientists are finding that Republicans and Democrats view each other with q growing disdain that borders on hatred. In one recent experiment, Democrats and Republicans showed instant, automatic negative bias against people of the other party -- more bias than whites show against blacks or vice versa and it's the one form of bigotry that's still socially acceptable.

It's my personal perception that this disdain for each other doesn't border on hatred, it IS hatred. As I've kept up with my friends on Facebook over the past few years, I've read more negative, hateful, spiteful things about our President than I've read about criminals. Things that would have gotten you investigated, if not arrested, by the FBI in 1960. And these are my friends!

A social conversation with one or more people gets out of hand more quickly when politics are introduced than any other subject. It causes people to raise their voices, makes the veins on their neck stand out, results in their faces getting red, and accusations and put-downs quickly follow.

We used to be pretty peaceful about our politics, even bi-partisan you might say. Our elected representatives and senators went to Washington to try and solve some of our problems and sometimes did. Now they almost never do. As a group, they are more distrusted than most groups in America and yet we keep on electing mostly the same people, even while contending that they all ought to be fired.

It's not difficult to figure out what causes this chasm between people that continues to grow wider with each passing day and that has allowed someone as callous and condescending as Donald Trump is to lead the polling for the Republican nominee for President and to allow the cackling Hillary Clinton to do the same on the Democratic side.

It's the 24-hour, seven days a week news coverage that people glue themselves to. In 1960, no such thing existed. Newspapers were read by almost everyone, people listened to objective reporting on the radio and there were only three television networks. Most everyone revered Walter Cronkite, the long-time anchor for CBS news as a truth teller to the point that when he declared the Vietnam War to be lost, it WAS lost. We admired and respected these paragons of truth and seldom questioned their honesty. During the Watergate investigation in the early 1970's that focused on President Nixon, as many Republicans as Democrats wanted him gone because they knew he had sullied the reputation of ALL elected officials. I can't imagine that happening today from either party.

That's because we don't listen to objective news reporting anymore. We only listen and read those sources that feed our biases and support our prejudices. I had a conversation with a person who's been a good friend of mine for years and we had never spoken a word about politics until that day. Then he told me with a straight face and a sincere countenance that he doesn't know what he would do if anything ever happened to Fox News because that's the only place you can find objective reporting anymore. Most Democrats would disagree with him, including me, because it appears to us that Fox News can be called many things, but objective isn't one of them. The same holds true for ANY network or personality who takes an editorial perspective rather than an objective one. There are many of the former and fewer and fewer of the latter and I believe it's destroying our democracy.

Can it be fixed? Is it too late for us to be saved? The only thing I know for sure is that the fix will have to come from us rather than them because they're all playing for a prize and they think the way to get that prize is to tell us what we want to hear. If we want the truth, we have to demand the truth because we're not going to get it otherwise.

And if we don't get it, the downward spiral will continue!