Having spent the month of January with a 3-year-old, toddlers have been on my mind a lot lately, so it’s only natural that my mind would turn next to politics, given that it’s an election year.
I don't have high hopes for any of this; no one has bothered to listen to my plea for a shorter election season (I don’t want much, just don’t start campaigning for the next election on Election Night) and now I’m pulling for the Great Giant Meteor to just end it already, because a meteor strike would be less disruptive than what we’ve been doing lately but until then, let’s just get through this with a modicum of civility, okay?
Having said that, I’m betting the mortgage payment that when I said ‘toddlers’ you decided that I must be speaking of whatever political party you are not affiliated with, because that’s the party that’s populated with toddlers, right?
Ha, ha! Joke’s on you and you can make that check out to Rocket Mortgage. Everyone in both parties have been acting like toddlers, but today I’m talking about The Pundits.
You know who they are: they’re the people who are paid pretty good money to explain the news to us, comment on that explanation, and then offer some guidance on how you might want to think about everything they just said.
Pundits are everywhere, working for just about every news outlet, and that’s okay: America’s newspapers were founded by actual Founding Fathers with the idea that, on top of reporting the news, the editors would be free to have opinions and share them.
What’s not okay is that We,The People apparently haven’t noticed that the money stakes have changed a bit since Ben Franklin bought his first newspaper (Nerd alert: The Pennsylvania Gazette), and we’re all losing because of it.
Ostensibly, The Pundit is an evangelist for The Right Way of Thinking. The Pundit very, very much wants us all to believe The Right Way of Thinking, as evidenced by the amount of time they spend exhorting us to distrust/avoid/give the side eye to anyone who follows The Wrong Way of Thinking. They’re quite passionate about it, and they’re good at prodding us into being passionate, too, which explains the pretty good money they’re paid to do it.
Given how passionate The Pundit is about their ideology you’d think that, if everyone in the world woke up tomorrow with their minds miraculously changed to The Pundit’s Way of Thinking, The Pundit would be happy, right? The Greater Good that they’ve been espousing has been achieved, so The Pundit’s job is done. They can stand down, having fought the good fight and now that the guys in the white hats have won, The Pundit can find something else to do.
Ha, ha! Joke’s on you, again! Today, The Pundit has no interest in actually achieving anything other than ratings. The Pundit works for an organization that needs readers/listeners/viewers to make money, and if you’re not ticked off, you’re not reading/listening/viewing, or at least not as often as you would read/listen/view when you’re hopped up about all those Wrong Thinkers out there. The Pundit isn’t there to convert you; The Pundit is there to keep your eyeballs fixed on them and the best way to do that is to keep you enraged. Worse still: The Pundit has no intention of standing down, because they’re making all that pretty good money and who wants that to stop?
It’s been said, and debunked, that if you put different kinds of ants in a jar they’ll behave peacefully until someone shakes the jar. This thought is usually followed by a plea to consider who is shaking our jar. It’s well-established that no one needs to shake the jar to start a war, for us or the ants, but it’s worth wondering who is betting on how long we can keep shaking ourselves, and who is winning that bet.
And that’s no joke.
Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.
