By Eric Valentine
Last year, Wood River Weekly set out to run a regular column called Vision2020. The hope was to share insights on life hacks and new ways to look at things, to start off the decade with a clear vision on how to live, work and love better. We thought we could even tie it into something one of our advertisers were doing in the Valley, make it a sort of advertorial editorial. And then COVID hit.
With the cancellation of many events and the struggles of many eateries, gyms and more, advertising decreased and so did the options for the Vision2020 column. It became a few inches of newspaper space I could use to share more personal things about myself and my life. I wrote about everything from kale caesar salad recipes to the love I still hold for my deceased wife. It was a pleasure to write.
Now we’re in 2021 and it only took six days for the craziness of 2020 to look rather tame. And it has led me to the conclusion that this one nation under God is now one nation under two realities. We are all to blame. We are all a part of it.
So it’s incumbent upon all of us to do an inventory of what our role is. Here, my role is something some call “the fourth estate.” No, this does not mean I keep a fourth vacation home. Not many journalists even keep one.
The fourth estate is a phrase coined by British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke in the late 1700s, toward the tag end of the Age of Enlightenment. Burke is regarded as the father of modern conservatism. His phrase refers to the idea that there are three branches of government. In America, they are the legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch. Built in with checks and balances, these three branches can still go awry or work together to undermine the will of the people. So a fourth estate is needed to keep guard, and that fourth estate is the media, Burke said, pre-Twitter.
Sadly, we are at a point in our cultural evolution where a sort of fifth estate is calling into question anything and everything the fourth estate does. And while it is understandable that a media run by—in some instances—corporations with profit motives, and—in other instances—government-friendly family foundations, it’s no wonder Americans don’t trust what they read in the paper or see on TV.
Some folks in the fifth estate claim to have insights into a fifth dimension. The Buffalo Shaman Guy whose image in horns and furs and star spangled face paint has been seen everywhere now storming the U.S. Capitol is captured in video explaining his Q-Anon belief system and how his third eye allows him to see into a higher reality that shows him which politicians are the ones drinking the adrenalyn-rich blood of tortured, sex-trafficked children. I’m not making this up!
But he is. And while we can perhaps roll our eyes at his belief structure, how should we look at the other belief structures that laid siege on the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6? When do we see that people with no more evidence of election fraud than Buffalo Shaman Guy were ready to zip-tie at best and hang at worst the Vice President of the United States who was only trying to count the Electoral College votes that by all verifiable evidence presented declared Joe Biden the next president?
In my interview with Eric Parker for a story in this edition called “Local 3%er Fields Media Inquiries,” we discussed the polarized nature of the country and how people only seem to believe what they want to believe, and how when we reach that point, shared reality is no longer a reality. We also discussed how what leads to the polarization is the lumping in we all do. We see a BLM protest where a building gets destroyed and we lump all BLM supporters into the anarchist group. We see the U.S. Capitol under siege and we lump all Republicans who merely voted for Trump in with the group who shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!” And the hatred just grows.
For now, I think some good advice is this. If you find yourself in a crowd, exercising your First Amendment rights, look to the left, look to the right, and if it’s a Confederate and Nazi flag next to you, then if you’re truly an American, you’re on the wrong side of any dimension.