I'm not going back to my family's house in Kansas for Thanksgiving, but the run-up to the holidays always makes me think of being there, and how my mom, her SO, and so many of their friends consume media. Being there always subjects me to their of local news, which is all the murder and disaster they can fit into 22 minutes (plus eight minutes of commercials).
It's an invitation to start screaming and never stop, and it produces a siege mentality. My mom lives in a part of the world where, by comparison, fucking nothing has ever happened, but since all she and her friends ever hear about is the worst bit, they think they inhabit a much crueler moral universe than they actually do. Then, to relax, they read or watch modern-day thrillers about serial killers, terrorist attacks, government conspiracies, and/or the eighteen different types of "NCIS." I've ranted about it before, but the average network crime show can get sufficiently weird that the only difference between it and a slasher movie is that the show starts when the cops show up. As John Rogers puts it, the name of this genre is "momcore."
There's a tendency, I think, among people my age and a little younger to do the same thing with politics. If the news is bad, it's all we hear about; if there's some good news, it gets pushed out of the cycle quickly by the next bad thing, or some idiot shows up talking about how "that's great, but what about [my vaguely related pet cause that has yet to be addressed]?" The defeats get dwelled upon, while the victories get downplayed. When things get legitimately bad, then, a lot of people just shut down, or retreat into apathy.
Historically, this isn't as bad as things have ever been. We have a lot of problems, but we've always had a lot of problems, and we've got a better set of tools right now than we've ever had before. It's going to take time, but we can fix all of this. All we have to do is show up.
(It's possible I'm writing this down as a form of self-care, because at this point, I suspect the only thing that will stop Ajit Pai from dismantling net neutrality is if he has a major cardiac event at some point in the next 36 hours. It's not something that can't be fixed, but man, it would be easier if we just didn't break the motherfucker in the first place.)
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