Gaither Campaign for Rural America

And, the outrage and deletion culture continues. It’s like we’re burning the whole library down because it has a fiction section.

Well, let’s put it this way. 

Outrage and the need to eradicate the voices of others is not owned by either fringe. 

Both sides want to burn the library. 

While one side wants to burn the fiction section or they’ll pack up their party supplies, the other wants to burn whole sections in non-fiction to protect themselves from tough truths. 

Our culture has turned into a temper tantrum tempest. 

When we should be steeping our tea, we’re breaking the teapot and the whole tea set. Why spend any time with our own thoughts and feelings before blaming both on anyone and everyone else. 

No responsibility is necessary in this sick blame game culture that stinks of self-righteousness as much as it reeks of burning, sweaty apparel that is on the new banned list because an employer made a decision to protect their employees as well as their company healthcare plans.

It’s not like that same company had both a religious and medical exemption, just like the “mandate” that was tossed out of the Supreme Court had exemptions, making both not actual mandates at all.

Republicans really love sticking it to the libs. Democrats love sticking it to the Republicans. It’s much more than just the politicians doing it, too.

Too often, the demands are made of elected officials elsewhere. How convenient. No tough conversations. No need to become well versed in why the community is shrinking.  

There is no question as to why these local elected officials come back election cycle after election cycle from the same party with the same policies and rarely have new and exciting results to share. It’s because they have nothing new and they have no results to offer. 

Growing groups of American voters seem to have bought into even this transparent failure even more quickly than ever before because they continue to struggle, and in both old and new ways. 

For many Americans, they have never experienced this level of sustained inflation across nearly every sector of the economy. Do they even care that it’s a global event? Would that matter? Should it matter?

The harder pill to swallow is that our nation, our culture, and our species have largely failed to confront this pandemic successfully. This is despite having stunning technological leaps forward, a more connected global community with a global pharmaceutical supply network, and despite having more knowledge about our immune systems and viruses than ever before in human history.

• The scientists and public health experts couldn’t communicate well with each other. Not enough data, and not good enough data could be communicated to those scientists and experts either.

• Those same professionals couldn’t communicate very well with legislators and policymakers that were leading people through this pandemic. 

• Those legislators and policymakers weren’t used to leading the people at all. In fact, most of them are led by the latest spiking outrage of their support groups, I mean voting blocks. 

• And, the people, who have been overworked, underpaid, and without affordable healthcare and other benefits for a long time, were also without a basic education in public health and so many other critical prerequisites that are critical in digesting and discussing these with family, friends, neighbors and school, county and city boards.

It’s not as if the professionals prepared the American people for these swift and massive changes in their lives over the last two years. Or, prepared them well enough for what was predictably going to be an evolving situation with information that would be changing their guidelines and best practices regularly.

The level of change that was demanded of all of us is difficult enough in a private setting, with someone you trust, and with a skilled professional that is not stressed out from fears of getting sick and dying or being able to pay the bills. 

All of this had to be done in isolation for many. Or, for others, in households with way too many people in them. And, in some cases, with volatile and potentially dangerous and hostile people.

Many of the methods that most of us had developed to mitigate our stress and anxieties, and other potentially damaging responses to living in today’s society (pre-pandemic), well, these methods of self-care were now wiped out for us, either by local orders, or by the shame and guilt that was spreading all over social media like a wildfire being blown by the winds we’ve all felt lately.

If you weren’t being judged by your closest friends who you wouldn’t see for a year or more, you were being ridiculed by your neighbors who never knew you at all for positions you never even uttered.

I think many people know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s disgusting the culture that we have descended into long before the pandemic dropped the curtain and we discovered that the haters who hate each other so much are really very similar in so many of the worst ways. 

The one thing they all agree on is that they enjoy eliminating people, not simply from their lives, but they have the need to eliminate them from all of our lives. They don’t see people they disagree with as fellow human beings or fellow Americans, and don’t care to ever understand anything about them either.

I think that more people follow that noisy herd in fears that it might turnaround and come after them next if they do not. In fact, I’ve witnessed it myself time and time again. 

I’ve called it the Covid knot. They will repeat conspiracies. They will even make statements that they know are not true because it’s about their own medical history. As the knot unwinds, the truth begins to reveal itself a bit at a time. It often ends in the shedding of some tears. 

It’s not easy to put on a front in order to placate your friend and neighborhood circles so that you can maintain your mental health and self-care routines. And, we all know the people that make all the noise require so much reassurance of their positions on all of it. 

I doubt they’ll read this. And, I doubt they’ll agree with it either. And, that’s okay. I still share a common thread of humanity with all of them. And, so do you.

May we not burn down the entire library just to make-believe we’re so separate when we know we’re not. If anything the last two years have taught us it should be that we’re all connected.