“The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
— William Wordsworth (1807)
Last December, a man started a conversation with me by making a disparaging comment on the integrity of a prominent politician. What he said was not a matter of truth, but opinion writ large and ugly. I responded with silence, for we shared a table at a gathering that was an occasion for joy and the comment was out of tune with the event and the people assembled there. Now, August is hard upon us and though temperatures in the Midwest have reached record highs, the presidential race promises to be, as Stevie Wonder’s album name foretold, “Hotter Than July.”
Since reaching the age at which I could vote for a president of the United States, I have had 12 opportunities to do so. I believe that I have kept that commitment, though I have no record from which to draw to confirm that assertion. But in the “flash-mob” world we live in now, it is merely sufficient to say that I have. For instance: On a social media site, two memes are circulating, both of which imply media legitimacy, both of which make negative statements about a presidential candidate, and both of which are untrue. I was castigated for having debunked one of the memes, something I thought would be an aid to a civilized conversation. But no: There seems to be a lack of civility in our political discourse.
My sister is a respected journalist with many years of writing behind her; hard-nosed investigations and critical analyses have led to the many awards associated with the various programs for whom she has written. Though it is early in the presidential race season, she has already grown weary of the “info-snacking” way in which so many people obtain knowledge about important events. We — my sister and I — perhaps have a higher standard, but it is disheartening to see so much nastiness being given such broad exposure. Analyses of Wordsworth’s poem (excerpted above) conclude that the narrator of the poem is anguished because people have lost touch with themselves and “Nature” in the rush to “get and spend” money. I would suggest that the poem’s theme might be applied to our current political landscape, one in which we have razed the trees of decency in the rush to crush our political opposites:
“For this, for everything, we are out of tune…”
I am now on the cusp of my 13th presidential voting opportunity, and I cannot remember a greater amount of vitriol being poured from campaign chests. And we may have had an equal lack of factual knowledge, but we have unprecedented access to manufactured “facts.” “Spoof” sites clearly state that their purpose is to humorously ridicule, but we don’t read the fine print: we click on “agree” and suspend our disbelief. (I’ll stop mixing this salad of metaphors, soon.)
August’s political landscape will be hotter than July, and the accursed “mainstream media” will be challenged with the task of stamping out the brush fires of falsehood, fact-checking and correcting the record for those willing to be objective. While we are “getting and spending,” we are also “cutting and pasting” and accepting at face value anything that validates our viewpoint. If we ever listened to each other, we have stopped. Let’s start again, and make our cases — however passionately — civilly, and with decency. Let’s try to get back in tune.