I was driving from Seattle to Morton, Washington, when I learned about the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump via staticky radio signal.
Minute-by-minute updates were coming through the car’s speaker, the reporter interrupting his interviewees to tell listeners that it wasn’t alleged shots fired but confirmed shots fired in Butler, Pennsylvania, at a Trump rally where thousands of people had convened. One spectator was dead, two critically injured. The shooter – who was the shooter, where had they fired from? The water tower behind the rally? The roof of a nearby shed? – was dead. Every so often the radio signal would cut out, and then come back. The only indisputable fact was the shock in everyone’s voices as they reported from the scene.
I don’t usually get my breaking news this way. More often than not, I learn about the day’s biggest story via a New York Times push notification, choppy tweets, or poorly written articles recommended on Google from publications vying to get the first headline. Quippy analysis from random people on the internet usually follows, staining my perception of the news almost immediately.
Not this time. I learned about the assassination attempt on the way to a campsite outside of cell phone service where I was able to absorb the news in real conversation with just a handful of other people, away from the internet discourse.
When I finally logged back in on Sunday night, the discourse was just as disappointing as I expected, wild conjecture that it was all an inside job spreading like wildfire. The internet provided no space to grieve this latest display of violence in a country obsessed with guns and borders and who’s right and who’s wrong, a place where winning power is the prime objective, even when it means losing everything else.
Each generation thinks their heyday years were the most eventful, but right now I think millennials and Gen Z-ers have everyone beat (full disclosure: I am an ancient Gen Z-er or baby millennial depending on the definition, so I might just be proving my own point). Still, I stand by my claim.
My mother, a teenager in the 1960s when the U.S. reeled from nine different political assassinations over the span of just six years, tells me that these days – the 2020s – feel more fraught than any other decade she’s lived in.
Her’s is a subjective viewpoint and your’s might be different, but my mom grew up crouching under desks for nuclear bomb drills in school, lost a good friend to the AIDs epidemic, lived in California during the riots over Rodney King’s brutal assault by police, survived the Loma Prieta earthquake… and still, she tells me, now feels crazier than ever before.
And the breaking news has not let up. Just two days after the shooting, the Republican National Convention began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Trump, his ear wrapped in gauze where he was grazed by a bullet, announced his running mate in the 2024 election: Ohio U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, whose infamous 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy” espoused a pull-em-up-by-their-bootstraps mythology, and blamed Appalachia’s decline on the disappearance of coal and a bad personal work ethic. Yes, J.D., coal was important, but who left the region behind to pick up the pieces of an industry gone under? Democrats and Republicans alike, you included.
Amid all this Trump news, President Joe Biden still has not recovered from his poor performance at a debate with Trump in late June. Every speech he’s done since has been scrutinized, each time he misspeaks, a new meme goes viral. Despite the urging from some Democrats, President Biden has repeatedly said he will not cede his campaign to anyone else.
All of this feels like we’re headed toward some type of cataclysm. I was in Seattle in July to listen to politicians, activists, and artists speak about climate change; about what needs to happen in order to limit the warming of our planet to 1.5°C over the next three decades to avoid devastating consequences.
What became painfully obvious is that the likelihood of meeting this goal, at least in this country, decreases as our attention remains fixed on political sparring that, at the end of the day, won’t even matter if we’re all dead from unprecedented heat waves or flooding or rising sea levels. Yet climate change is still treated as just one of many issues, all of them deprioritized by two men’s fight for power.
Politics isn’t everything, even when it might feel like it. Every four years administrations change and new policies are implemented. The only consistent thing about life in the U.S. is the people who live and work here.
I’ve come to bristle against patriotism, and I very much love this country. That’s why it hurts so much to see it in shambles. That’s also why I’m staying to see it through.
Claire Carlson is a reporter for DailyYonder.com who writes a weekly newsletter “Keep It Rural,” where this originally appeared.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2024
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