SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 – Often the big story lies unmentioned behind the lead story.
Take for example a recent screed on Facebook. A “friend” posted a piece allegedly by a police officer in Duluth, MN—the only attribution to the eloquent exposition was “A police officer.” (If lawyers and English professors were half as eloquent as the “police officer,” all lawyer jokes would cease and professor salaries would quadruple.) The “police officer” wrote long and deep about dangers faced by law enforcement officers confronting “bad people with guns.” The article sought sympathy and support for police.
Fair enough. But as I read graphic detail about “bad people with guns,” the big story I saw—unmentioned—was what distinguishes America from all other civilized nations: out-of-control proliferation of firearms. It prompted the question: “Why are police not demonstrating en masse in support of gun control?!”
The other big story: why America has a disproportionate number of “bad people.”
Another example of “silent and big” behind “loud and lead” is campaign finance. Headlines blast the latest hauls—“Trump, $X; Biden, $Y,” as if it were a football score, not a sad commentary on how our electoral process is financed or why it’s so expensive in the first place. Social media are replete with solicitations—many for outside races. “Moscow Mitch is close to defeat! Help McGrath raise the extra Z that it will take to win! Send money now!” The lead story: McConnell is vulnerable. The big story: Minnesotans are solicited for bets on the (November) Kentucky Derby.
What I see when I read such stories is the pressing need for reform. No other democracy runs political campaigns as we do. Democrats and Republicans solicit, raise, and spend vast sums to elect/re-elect our public officials. This debases our democracy by handing disproportionate leverage to a concentration of contributors—special interests. Yet so much of that money is wasted on media ads—ads that do nothing to educate or elevate the sorry state of our political discourse.
There’s an even bigger story here, and it ties to the Democrats’ wailing over Republicans’ power-play to confirm Amy Coney Barrett.
Sure, hypocrisy reigns supreme among Republican senators, who solemnly opposed rushing hearings on Merrick yet cynically favor doing so for Barrett. Their strategy, however, is wholly legitimate under the Constitution. That’s the big story, and it’s the same one behind senate “failure” to convict Trump of impeachment charges.
That big story is the antiquated construct of the senate under Article I—a framework fashioned nearly a quarter-millennium ago—before the dawn of modernity, when the country of 13 states along the Atlantic was a tiny fraction of its current size, largely agrarian and Anglo-centric (slaves being 3/5s human without the right to vote).
Yet who—among Democrats or Republicans; FoxNews or MSNBC; rightwing radio hosts or leftwing podcasters—talks about the need to re-evaluate our antiquated framework of government?
Next time you read a headline, see the bigger story.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
