News Junkie

Virtually the first thing I do every morning is turn on the TV and click to MSNBC, then CNN, switching back and forth between the two. Then I turn on the radio and listen to Democracy Now! or, since I'm hooked on images, I fire up my computer to watch it online. Finally, having received my morning dose of Trump's latest outrage, the only news worth reporting, it seems, by the US networks these days (Democracy Now! always covers some of what else is happening in the world), I turn at last to my writing.

Later I'll hear or watch the news on the CBC and maybe the BBC, but as a dual citizen of the US and Canada, and though I've been living in Canada now for more years than I lived in the United States -- and though I definitely feel something of a foreigner in the States now -- in my deepest self, I remain an American.

I was born in Minneapolis and raised on a family farm in south-central Minnesota, and the lakes and marshes, the woods and fields in that part of the state around the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, (though mostly given now to "hobby" farms, to wooded "estates"), remain the country of my heart.

Still, I'm no patriot, though I served a hitch in the US Navy in the last half of the 1950s. In the fall of 1970 my wife and I moved to Canada, specifically to the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, as American "refugees," as back-to-the-land dissidents. We became official landed immigrants in June 1971, and Canadian citizens in 1976. Our politics haven't changed. and in fact mine have become more radical. So I'm perhaps a little more interested in the news from south of our border than the average Canadian. In fact, I'm downright obsessed with it.

My practical wife, on the other hand, finds the TV news too upsetting to watch. She'll switch to the Weather Channel when my back is turned, which is more interesting to her than the news, not to say less depressing. She's a gardener, after all, lives happily in the here and now, and likes to know what she can expect from nature in the next day or so.  

Truth to tell, I'm getting rather tired myself of hearing about Trump to the exclusion of most other news. But he's the outlandish head of the most powerful (though possibly declining) nation in the world, and the dangerous, perhaps demented embodiment of all that's going down in the States right now, and I mean down. Something's gotta give, and that's some hope in what appears to be the worst of times in America's history -- and the world's.

Let me count the ways. His administration's Mexican border policy: treating Latin American refugees like criminals, separating innocent children from their parents, confining them in internment camps in a criminal return to the treatment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians; Canada was complicit) during World War II. Trump's dismissal of climate change, his pulling the US out of the Paris Accord. His and his hand-picked cabinet's intended dismantlement of progressive government programs in the interest of privatization, of profit. His and his ultra-rightwing enablers' apparent dream of a kind of Eden for the super rich, for the winners in this corporate world. Forget the rest of humankind. They're life's losers.

There's a lot of outrage now, a lot of protest, a lot of recognition of what's happening. Therein lies some hope, I tell myself.