There was a time, back when I was in my 20s, when what seemed to matter most to the American voters who lived around me was the apparent shortage of lids for canning jars. I was working for a Midwestern congressman then, and just about all people talked about across our rural district when they encountered their representative in Congress was – yep! – the canning lid shortage.
People were suspicious that the jar makers had orchestrated a shortage of those inexpensive little flats on top of the jars so they could sell more of the full glass-and-lid assemblies, which yielded a higher profit margin.
So our congressional team went into action. We set up a subcommittee hearing, and we had the congressman demand a Federal Trade Commission investigation. Somebody on the FTC staff gave us statistics on jar and lid production – and that earned our trusted source a nickname: “Deep Jar.” That’s how Congress works, you see – then and now, too. (:54)
This experience was my early lesson in the gap between what seemingly matters to voters and what really ought to matter to the nation and the world. Big issues that will affect us for generations often don’t resonate with voters as powerfully as what’s close to home and easy to grasp. Of course, voters have the right to decide what government ought to do – that’s democracy – but the democratic process is corrupted by the skewing of voters’ attention. That’s done by the very politicians who benefit by that distraction and, often, by biased media outlets, like the Republican press agents of Fox News. Also, too much journalism rewards the superficiality of politicians, because the odd stuff gets our attention.
You almost can’t blame the officeholders. Big problems demand thoughtful solutions that often impose hard sacrifices, and I haven’t yet met a politician eager to pave their road to re-election with the discomfort of voters. No wonder a candidate who wins often becomes an officeholder without a serious agenda – because most of them got where they are by relentlessly avoiding commitment to confronting what matters. (1:55)
Take climate change, for example. The latest U.N. report finds that the planet is already sustaining some irreversible losses, and that half of humanity is “living in the danger zone,” in the words of Secretary General Antonio Guterres – where reduced crop yields, mass migration and humanitarian crises are all but inevitable. We are killing the planet.
You might assume that an existential crisis for half of the world would be a top priority among American voters. But a Pew survey last year revealed that “dealing with climate change” was 14th on the list of top concerns.
We are distracted, it seems, by other topics – including an influx of undocumented migrants on our southern border, which Donald Trump and his lackeys hype with the hope that it will win them election.
That’s just one example. There’s a lot of distraction from what matters: The House of Representatives sets up silly impeachment inquiries into the Secretary of Homeland Security and the President, and threatens to shut down the government if the staff of the IRS isn’t cut. Right-wing politicians like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik talk ominously of “socialism” in America, and state legislatures get citizens riled up about books in school libraries that mention sex or have gay characters.
We are thus turned away, day after day and year after year, from what desperately needs our relentless attention.
As with everything in our universe, there’s a scientific reason for this phenomenon: Humans aren’t so good at dealing with problems that aren’t imminent, which is explained, scientists tell us, by evolution.
The human brain, it seems, evolved to respond to immediate threats, and while we’re now smart enough to see what’s coming toward us in many cases, we haven’t yet evolved to deal as aggressively with those more distant threats. We’re distracted by the immediate instead. And, psychologists say, the brain is best equipped to respond to problems that have a human face. That could explain why we seem to focus so much more on the so-called migrant crisis than on global warming.
So citizens get a skewed view of what matters, and ultimately produce a government that lacks a mandate to do what is important and right.
So the issues that the conscience of a politician whispers ought to be on the agenda are overwhelmed by those that the survival instinct of a politician screams can be a smart campaign issue.
So we talk about brown people “replacing” Americans descended from Europeans, and we fret that the socialists are coming for our guns, and we freak out about teachers using the word “gay” in an elementary classroom.
And, yes, so we talk about such things as canning lids – as the world spins into a climate crisis that people just don’t consider, really, all that urgent. Maybe we’ll get around to it someday. We are left, meanwhile, to long sadly for a shot at evolving more quickly into humans with an ability to do better for themselves and their neighbors.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.