So now the most partisan national voices on Fox News and MSNBC, or any number of polarizing influencers like Tucker Carlson, are beaming directly from national studios into small town America, uninfluenced by the urges of local newspapers and radio stations to preserve communities where people feel some degree of connection and mutual respect. As in the natural world, healthy interdependence in local ecosystems is diminished, making them more vulnerable to invasive species, disease, and, in society, sick ideas.
In a 2021 interview with his colleague Ezra Klein, Barack Obama said that when he began running for president in 2007, “I could go to small, majority-white, conservative towns in rural America and get a fair hearing because people had never heard of me. … People had no preconceived notions of what I believed. They could take me at face value.”
But Obama added, “If I went to those same places now, or if I'm a Democrat campaigning in those places now, most of my news is coming from Fox News, Sinclair News Station, talk radio or Facebook pages. And it's really hard to penetrate that. The people in these communities haven't changed. If you're fed that information every single day, you're going to come into every conversation with certain preconceived notions that are really hard to break.”
Sadly, we have gone from a country where you can't say “Hell” on the radio to one that is perpetually subject to a for-profit political and psychological manipulation system (with Russia and China adding fuel to the fire today). So people are not just divided, they are being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is now big business at home, while geopolitical rivals wage war by other means.
More than ever before, we are living in what Seidman described to me in 2016 as a “never-ending storm” in which moral distinctions, context, perspective, and everything else that people and politicians need to make good judgments are being blown away.
They get blown away — that's exactly what happens to the plants, animals, and people in ecosystems that lose mangroves.
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