Hillary Clinton’s journey from disbelief to anger, wrapped in the guise of a book tour for her latest book: What Happened, is a catharsis – an inner journey to restore her own soul – and America’s as well. Whether we voted for Hillary Clinton or not, HER journey is ours as well.
What has happened to America since the the news media shifted its spotlight to hate, misogyny, and the embolden alt-right nationalist crowd and its bot-empowered leader, Donald Trump?
Hillary Clinton as America’s president would have stopped a steady news feed about everything Trump. The news and images would have been about HER. Her words would have been accorded a weight and power now accorded Trump. Would her words and actions have been different?
As lies, misogny, alt-right, fake news, bot generated news and Trump’s latest tweet become front page news it crowds out news of everything that we value. Who can resist the power of “breaking news.”
Everything Trump does generates a steady cashflow for the news media. Les Moonves, the president of CBS news got it right when he declared ”Trump’s run is ‘damn good’ for CBS.”
The media feeds on breaking news. Whether true or false, everything the president of the United States says or does becomes breaking news. At some point our overstimulated brain can no longer distinguish right from wrong. Like a heroine addict, like someone with an addiction to sugar, we find it difficult to break the habit. Without an “off” button, we succumb to a daily diet of empty news. It reduces the power of truth telling by filling our minds with empty calories.
What nourishes us?
What difference would Hillary Clinton as president have made? Just FRONT page images of Hillary Clinton smiling, Hillary Clinton showing up with empathy, compassion and gestures of alliance with ordinary people and people of power would have made a difference.
In a sense, a President Hillary would have been our Princess Diana: a woman of power, turning the power of compassion and focus of the media on things that matter most to us humans.
Hillary Clinton as president of the once great America would have rolled up her sleeves, put on wading boots, and waded into the middle of the roiled waters of climate change. Her very public actions would have given us the courage we needed to step into those waters too.
In the end, words don’t really matter. What matters is WHAT we do, that is, the actions we take that light up our limbic brain. The limbic brain is the “beef” of the human brain. It’s the middle part of our brain that makes us human. It’s the answer to the question: “Where’s the beef?” It’s that part of our brain that reminds us what really makes us human is what unites us, what brings us closer together to work together, to collaborate to help each other and those less fortunate than us.
Humankind. We can be both.
Alexia Parks blog was first published on the Huffington Post.