Popping bubbles

I’m feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle. After just nodding off for a bit, suddenly the whole country has changed. It’s gone mad for tea – angry, angry tea.

Serves me right for not listening to Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Fox News.

[shudder]

But then again, I made a choice that for my own sanity I was not going to watch Fox. I would rather have root canal than listen to Sarah Palin. (It’s true. I “liked” that on Facebook.) I tuned out the T.E.A. party rallies and their distortions, using patriotism as a weapon against their opponents.

After we overwhelmingly elected Barack Obama as president in Fall of 2008, I slowly retreated into my safe little progressive bubble. I tuned out the conservative right. Obama had been elected after promising to tackle health care reform, jobs and the economy, which had collapsed on the Republicans’ watch. As far as I was concerned, he was doing the job he had been asked to do.

So now, in Fall of 2010, I discover that many Americans believe Obama is a Muslim Nazi Communist bent on destroying a country who does not want health care reform. The Democrats are at fault for the economy, according to Republicans, who seem to have forgotten that in 2008 we all very nearly dropped into another Great Depression.

What happened?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece of anti-T.E.A. party art on my Facebook wall. Before I had a chance to even make my own cup of tea, the posting drew challenges and sparked a debate between my conservative and progressive friends.
In the 20 postings that followed my piece of art, I not only got an earful of views, but a quick snapshot of the political landscape and what has changed in America in just two years.

Today, many Americans live in political bubbles of our own choosing. That’s because the mainstream media has lost its relevancy for them. A large segment of the population – on both the left and the right – can get up in the morning, surf the Internet, watch cable news programs all day and go to bed at night, all without seeing anything that challenges our political views. We can choose sources of information that already agree with our worldview.

But it is more than opinion and viewpoints that we find in our bubbles. It’s facts and history. Those change depending on which bubble you are in.
So, when someone in a political bubble on the left bumps into a someone from a bubble on the right, the debate quickly explodes because the two sides have few facts to agree on. They don’t even agree about previously unchallenged topics like American history and the Constitution. And since either side can choose to ignore the mainstream media, we have no moderator to help us sort through the realities.

Time to pop the bubbles. Including my own.