It’s hard at times to reconcile with the fact that we are essentially living in two very different realities in the United States.

In one of those realities (the actual one most of us are living in), a growing number of people across the political spectrum are angered, terrified and disgusted by actions being taken in their names by people and agencies which seem to have little or no accountability. They’re exhausted by the constant airing of grievances having little to do with what’s actually going on in the country, and by the broad generalizations about, well, everything, that ignore context, nuance and facts to promote a political viewpoint. (Seriously, all the slippery-slope, Gish gallop and other fallacious arguments aren’t going to persuade anyone to your side. Truth can be messy; only when you accept that can you start to fix what’s wrong.)

In the other, committing a crime of any kind is apparently OK as long as you’re the right kind of partisan, God chooses sides in politics, accountability is for losers, might makes right, and facts, schmacts. As long as our side wins, woo hoo!

Of course, as I’m writing this, I’m recovering from a sinus/ear infection, so who knows? Maybe I’m imagining it all. And yet …

I see evidence of these different realities every day, in letters, social media posts, and news about what’s been going on. There’s anger about ICE actions in Minnesota and elsewhere, as well as those who defend the actions as righteous (usually claiming the reason for protests is because laws are being enforced when it’s really mainly about how they’re being enforced and entrapping people who’ve actually played by the rules). There’s lingering resentment over the 2020 election, and frustration (from those who investigated and found it to be a free and fair election) over the fact that some just can’t let it go. There’s disgust over the stonewalling over the full release of the Epstein files and eye-rolling from those who think we should move on (I think most of us are pretty clear on this: If someone is shown in the files to have committed crimes, they should be prosecuted, no matter who they are or to which party they belong, full stop.).

Apparently those of us in the messy middle who acknowledge that it’s possible for two things to be true at once (like someone wanting immigration reform and for ICE to be reined in) and who know that hyperpartisan politics and truth don’t mix well are the nuts, according to some, and thus support lawbreaking (ahem, Jeffrey Epstein, et al., various felons in office), tax handouts (how are all those subsidies going for Tesla, Exxon, etc.?), socialism/planned economy (all those bailouts because of tariffs!) and other truly un-democratic things like making voting easier for U.S. citizens. How dare!

Keeping up with all of this craziness is a full-time job, and then some. It’s no wonder I let myself get so tired and run-down that I got sick.

I’ve spent more than half my life in the news business, most of it on the news side, and I’ve been very proud to have spent most of that at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. There is no coordination between the opinion and news departments for the simple reason that there shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t mean that some readers don’t believe it happens. (I didn’t even respond to a state lawmaker who suggested I coordinate with the news side about his letter to the editor. Seriously, dude? I printed his letter, and that was the end of the discussion.)

In the current atmosphere, where so many have been conditioned to believe that the news media is a liberal wasteland, confirmation bias helps with the heavy lifting. When you’ve decided that a news source is liberal (despite evidence to the contrary), you tend to gravitate toward “news” (in scare quotes because it’s often not actually news but opinion labeled as news) with a more pronounced conservative lean (and vice versa), and before long, you don’t believe anything coming not from your preferred sources.

Sigh.

I’ve said so often that we should have a varied news diet that I fear it’s falling on deaf ears. Perhaps we could agree to something like this:

🧐 Choose news sources that show, rather than just tell. Make sure they back any allegations with proof, preferably in the form of original documents made available for review. Accusations without proof should be doubted till proven, even if you really want to believe them. And please, please, don’t get your news from social media rage bait or from cable shoutfests that are nothing but thinly veiled opinion.

😬 If your preferred news sources never make you feel uncomfortable, cast your net wider. Truth and reality can be uncomfortable. As Finley Peter Dunne wrote, the job of newspapers is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (sounds a bit like that dude named Jesus).

📰 Enhance your media literacy by learning the differences between news and opinion and, further, how to differentiate between advertising, news articles, letters, columns and editorials. It would save a lot of frayed nerves on the part of both callers and those who answer the phones at newspapers if you identify those correctly. So many times when I was a clerk, I would have to calm down people who’d been endlessly transferred because no one took the time to really figure out what they were calling about, and part of that was because they called things by the wrong name. Now it seems we have fewer people who can’t tell an ad from an article, but more who don’t understand that quoting someone in a news story isn’t injecting the paper’s opinion, or the constraints of news holes and audience attention spans that shape how we write, or that our editorial and other opinion writers don’t write or edit news stories. (How many times have the trolls tried to tell me how to do my job? I’ve lost count, but none of them have experience writing for newspapers, soooo …) Opinion pages aren’t the place to look for news, just as news pages aren’t the place for the writer’s opinion unless it’s clearly marked as opinion.

✅ Fact-check things on social media before reposting them, using sources that provide links to original documents. It really isn’t that hard to take a few minutes to ensure that what you’re passing along is true, and doing that will stop a falsehood’s further spread. Once it’s out there and spreading, the harder it is to convince anyone that it’s not true because for some people, repeating a lie makes it true. 😡

✒️ Write letters to the editor, paying attention to the rules (we post those every day on our Voices page, so there’s little excuse for our letter-writers, but too many still flout them and then insist they get special treatment). We get far more liberal-leaning than conservative letters simply because more liberals and independents write letters (I’d say it’s because they’re more angry about the state of the nation, and more old-school conservatives are joining them; the MAGA types don’t consider them conservative … I think Ronald Reagan, John Paul Hammerschmidt, Winthrop Rockefeller and others would disagree 🙄). If you want to change that, you have to be part of the solution. It might help if you included your sources or links to them, attribute any statements of fact to their source, and re-read what you write before sending it in. Believe me, if I have to spend hours trying to find sources or trying to figure out what you’re talking about, I’m going to move on to other letters, and I’ve done that on letters across the spectrum. There are only so many times I can say, “Where are they getting this?” before I give up (it’s about three to four unless the claims are absolutely outrageous or obviously false, like the letter that said Tim Walz was being forced to resign as Minnesota governor [because of all the mishegoss stirred up by a right-wing provocateur who claimed to have uncovered fraud that had already been uncovered by the Biden administration and was already being prosecuted], when Walz was only dropping out of his re-election campaign, not resigning from office altogether).

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Every day brings new frustrations (for me right now, it’s that my infection seems to be lingering; my doctor extended the antibiotics by a couple of days, so here’s hoping; the weakness and dizziness are no fun, nor are the headaches or the sore throat from draining congestion). For many of us, the frustrations we have are exacerbated by hyperpartisan politics, which really shouldn’t have that big of an impact on how we live our lives. Hence the frustration.

I want to live in a world where caring for the least of these isn’t looked upon as weakness, where the rules are clear and followed by everyone, and loving our neighbor/welcoming the stranger is second nature. Then again, I learned those ideals in church long ago before they were considered woke. How dare Jesus teach us such things, or that we should call out hypocrisy and corruption!

And I definitely want to live in a world where people get more upset about agencies overstepping their bounds and the law, the shielding of sex-traffickers of children, blatantly racist social media posts, and abuses of power, regardless of party, than they do over a Super Bowl halftime show in mostly Spanish put on by an American citizen.

Yep, Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, so its citizens, like Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin (who was also in the halftime show, and looks closer to 40 than 54, far younger than Kid Rock, who is 11 months his senior), are U.S. citizens at birth. Crazy how that works, and crazy that so many people seem to have forgotten that lesson (and many others) from their civics classes in high school.

But yeah, liberal media … boo.

Sure, there are liberal media sources just as there are conservative news sources, but most responsible news organizations don’t mix their news and opinion, ahem, liberally, as places like cable news networks, and online sites like the Daily Caller and Democratic Underground and others do. We’ve seen troubling signs in papers like The Washington Post and networks like CBS, but there are still plenty of news organizations doing the hard work.

I’m proud to work for one of those news organizations, and I know we’ll keep doing that work as long as we’re able.