More than half of the $23 million-plus [Trump] raised has come from people who identify their occupation as “retired.” Other titles of people who gave the most contributions in aggregate include “attorney,” “CEO,” “sales” and “home maker.”
More than half of the $23 million-plus [Trump] raised has come from people who identify their occupation as “retired.” Other titles of people who gave the most contributions in aggregate include “attorney,” “CEO,” “sales” and “home maker.”
Sadly, I believe you’re correct, as I’ve seen firsthand its effects on someone without cognitive decline.
A few years ago my mother’s demeanor and topics of conversation (I lived 1000 miles away, but we spoke by phone frequently) changed markedly over the course of weeks.
Much more fearful, a sudden focus on border issues, illegals…took a minute to tweak, but then I asked if she’d changed news providers. Uh-huh, Fox it was.
I saw this shift with my father as his age made him have to spend more time at home and less being physically active. He’d once given a pan-handler a twenty dollar bill when I was a young adult. I asked why so much. The answer: “If he’s going to humble himself by coming to me to ask, he clearly needs it more than me.”
I asked if it bothered him that it might be spent on drugs or alcohol. The answer: “If that’s what he needs to get through the night, it’s not for me to judge him.” This quick exchange had a profound impact on me. I tried to model my values on it going forward. It taught me a lot about compassion.
Years later, he thought Trump was a joke in 2016. By 2020, his health in decline, he was on the Trump bandwagon. It made me so sad.
A couple of years ago, my mom somehow seemed very insistent about the “caravan” crossing the border. Turns out she had started watching Fox news when I didn’t even know her to pay attention to news at all.
I was trying to explain to her that this was really small potatoes news since - at the time - I had seen very few headlines about it on the usual subs on reddit. I also encouraged her to strive toward empathy about why a person would leave their home and all their previous life to travel by foot through Mexico to the US. And then after more news came out, tried to point out that they were asylum seekers from a country the US had intentially interfered with to maintain control in the region. She never got super Trumpy, but she seemed to keep talking about the “border crisis” almost every time we had a discussion. I then flatly told her that this was a distraction because of mid-term elections.
Eventually, she abandoned Fox news, but I’m not sure if it was my brow beating or some other reason. She started watching CNN a lot and a few times that I’d walk through the living room in the evenings, Don Lemon’s big head (or Chris Cuomo) was just always at this shrill tone of exasperation. One day I told her that just because we may agree with what’s being said here doesn’t make this news either. News shouldn’t tell you how to feel about what’s going on in the world.
I’m harkening back to my college journalism days when my professors bemoaned the 24-hour news cycle. Working in a newsroom, we would sneer at the way TV stations covered current events. And now, I don’t know how or when we will ever get to a point where the news can be communicated during prime time that doesn’t get editorialized to hell - on either side of the aisle.