Alienating us from each other

I’ve long toyed with the idea of calling in to one of those national talk radio shows. You know the kind; the thinner the host’s argument, the louder they scream, journalists are the “liberal media,” and everyone else is either a “patriot” or a “left wing radical.” Yeah, one of those.

In this hopeless fantasy, I’d get past the call screener, the host’s Kill Switch of Cowardice would be out of order, and it would go something like this: Hi, Mister Right Wing Radio Host. I’m a member of the socalled media elite you were just sort of joking, I guess, about lining up and shooting for treason. While your tech people try to fix your kill switch, I thought I’d tell you a little about myself.

I don’t live in Washington or New York City (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I did once dream of working for The New York Times or The Washington Post, but it turned out that when I got to Albany I fell in love with the newspaper and upstate New York. My wife opened a business, we saved up and found a little farm we could afford on our modest incomes, raised kids and horses and chickens and even llamas for a while. We haul our trash to the local transfer station, go to a square dance every once in a while, grow fruits and vegetables and talk about maybe opening a farm stand in our retirement years.

Like a lot of my neighbors, I can see things changing, and it worries me. I worry about it especially in the winters when there’s been less snow for some years now, which means less spring melt, a lower water table, and the prospect of a dry well — water our animals, and the animals of all the farmers around here, need to stay alive.

I worry about it in the spring and summer when there’s too much rain, when the fruit growers and vegetable farmers can see a bad crop in the early making, when they guy I buy my hay from worries that if things don’t dry out in time, tens of thousands of bales’ worth of hay will rot or go to seed in fields too soggy to drive a tractor in. Down at Agway or Tractor Supply, we watch the price of grain go up.

Like a lot of folks around here, I own guns — practical guns for weasels and fishers that come for our chickens, and a little more firepower for coyotes, which fortunately stay in the woods and serenade us, country style, at night. If you need an assault rifle to take out a critter or an imagined intruder, you ought to be at a firearms class or an optometrist, not a gun store. You want reliable home defense? Get a dog. Or a pumpaction shotgun. Any cop will tell you that cha-chunk is a sound every burglar knows to run away from.

I used to listen to shows like yours for laughs years ago, until sometime around 9/11, when you and your colleagues on radio and over at Fox News used a terrorist act perpetrated by zealots with a twisted view of Islam to paint all Muslim people as a threat to

America, just like fascists and neo-Nazis were doing in parts of Europe. I heard you calling people “vermin” and “cockroaches” like the ethnic-cleansing radio personality in “Hotel Rwanda.” I started listening seriously, as a journalist, to your proliferation of hateful, vicious, reactionary ideas.

I saw it metastasize into birtherism. Into white nationalism. Into anti-government, racist militias like the Oath Keepers. Into the tea party. Into uninformed candidates who seemed sincere enough but had no clue what they wanted to do other than “take their country back” and “cut waste, fraud and abuse” — vacuous tropes spewed by right-wing media types and pandering politicians without a clue of what competent governance is.

And for that, Mister Radio Host, I blame you. I blame you for painting our government-of-the-people as the enemy. Of feeding your listeners false facts and rage and empty platitudes that leave them unable to engage in an informed, thoughtful, collaborative way with other well-meaning citizens in the challenge of changing a system they don’t feel is serving them adequately. Of leaving them vulnerable to any smooth-talking demagogue who promises to drain the swamp, or make government small enough to drag into a bathroom and drown it, or make sure only the “right” people vote.

And I blame you, Mister Radio Host, for painting the mainstream media as an enemy of the people. I’ve worked 42 years in this business, and know my colleagues to be serious, hard-working people who love freedom and express their patriotism by trying to make the great American experiment work every day by finding the truth and reporting it fully, holding our government accountable, and speaking truth to power. And telling interesting stories about the people in their communities. You have alienated a whole swath of America from its real journalists, not the hucksters and ideologues like you and your ilk, and from the marketplace of ideas that has been a vital part of our democratic republic since its founding.

Shame on you.