…but we don’t like the honest headlines so what are we gonna do?

by Don Hall

Despite the desperate need to spin reality, perspective is essential to keep your head from exploding like that dude in Scanners. Perspective is about wondering what the headlines might look like from a different angle than your baked-in certitude of moral authority dictates.

President Biden won the 2020 election by a margin of seven million votes. That’s a lot. The other headline might read:

[HEADLINE]
Biden wins election with less than three-percent of the American population.

Doesn’t sound as cool or righteous. Maybe we dive in a little more, recognize that 161 million people actually voted, and rewrite it this way:

[HEADLINE]
Biden dominates Trump by five percent of the popular vote.

Jeesh. Still doesn’t read like the we Lefties would like it to so we spin.

Like most of the Left, the mass shooting in Texas outraged me. The inept, fat police force made me furious. America is overrun by an epidemic of gun violence and something must be done about it, right?

In this age of polarized dipshittery, I've learned that when something reported on the news really angers me, I need to dig deeper because it means someone wants me to be mad.

45,222 gun deaths in 2020.
393 million guns in circulation.

That's less that 0.012% of the available guns being used to kill.

85,694 emergency department visits per year for nonfatal injuries.

0.03% of 393 million guns being utilized against humans resulting in injury or death.

Not really an epidemic in any true sense of the word.

In fact, a more accurate headline might be:

[HEADLINE]
99.97% of Guns in America Owned by Responsible Law-Abiding Citizens

And we wonder why the Second Amendment-types get so frothy-mouthed whenever we go on the offensive about getting rid of guns. The image of Americans running around with guns, shooting people like the Forever Purge is goofy. It’s almost exactly in line with GOP images of young women hooking up, getting pregnant, and treating abortion like a bag of Skittles. It’s horseshit.

None of this is to indicate that our national obsession with guns is not somewhat ridiculous. If we want to solve problems, ginning up the propaganda doesn't really help in what is supposed to be a democracy.

Personally, the cartoonish amount of guns in this country baffles me. On the other hand, the cartoonish amount of soda choices is equally numbing. America is a country that has become all about too much, too many. I'm one of those in the Exhausted Majority who does his best to look past the hyperbole of hysteria and understand the complexities of issues that tend to divide us. I'm rarely successful but I'm trying and that's something.

The gun thing is deeply complicated. If we can acknowledge that there are A) far too many guns for anyone's comfort level in this country, B) the overwhelming majority of guns are not used to kill people, and C) of those that are used to kill people, over half are used for self harm rather harm to others, we need to look past the hysteria and locate the problems that exist. The problems unaddressed that feed the tiny percentage that cause us exaggerated fear yet still represent a significant issue.

Back to democracy and perspective.

The crisis headlines tell us that the very existence of someone like Sen. Joe Manchin or the morons behind the failed coup on January 6 mean that democracy is in danger! The partisan SCOTUS overturning the advances of the past century one precedent at a time is cause for handwringing and running around like our hair is on fire.

Except that these are all results of democracy. People voted. It is established fact that A) most voter suppression laws actually suppress very little in terms of voting and B) voter fraud is almost non-existent. People voted. In 2016, in a completely fair election, we got Donald Trump. In 2020, we got Joe Biden. In the way back machine, Strom Thurmond was elected as was Bernie Sanders. In the eye of history, lots of people we would have disagreed with were voted into higher office and each time it was democracy that put them there.

If losing is indicative of a broken democracy rather than one side’s or the other’s inability to sell their ideas to a larger portion of those voting, then democracy isn’t broken, we are.

Democracy is a tool. That’s it. A means to an end. That end is as malleable as the population for whom the democracy is designed.

I recall being in one of many improv groups back in Chicago. As with most ad-hoc improv groups in the 90’s, most of the performance was bad and audiences rightly didn’t dig. When a performer would say “The audience just didn’t get it.” I would quickly respond “That’s bullshit. The audience always gets it. If we aren’t presenting our brilliance convincingly, they’re right to throw dog turds at us. Communication resides first with those doing the presentation. If we suck, it’s because we sucked.”

[HEADLINE]
Improv audience too stupid to understand Simpsons reference.

or

[HEADLINE]
Audience gets it. Improv group blew it.

That’s how political discourse works as well. If your ideas are not embraced on the merits of your presentation of them, it isn’t the fault of the almost equally opposed other side of the electorate, it’s on your presentation. That, my friends, is how democracy works.

As my dad said about the overturning of Roe “If it matters to people, they’ll show up and vote.”