Can we bridge the reality gap?

It’s a strange and dangerous time to live in America. At least, it is if you take the word of conservative news outlets like Fox or Breitbart. Of course, it’s tough to take their word for it because they treat every story as a crisis and every crisis as potentially world-ending. While no one says it outright, the general vibe can be summed up this way:

The enemy is at the gates!

Good luck pinning down who that enemy is, though. One day the enemy is the threat of terrorists pretending to be refugees. The next day brings the threat of trade deficits. Wait, no, the threat is across the southern border in Mexico. To hear conservative media and the current administration talk about it, those aren’t Mexicans across the border. They are a modern incarnation of the Mongol Horde bent on abusing our social safety nets and stealing our jobs. You know the jobs they’re talking about. They’re those lucrative, high-competition careers in farm labor and janitorial services.

There is a problem with this relentless march of hysteria that fills the airwaves on a daily basis. It has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of everyday citizens. Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s trade war with the economic colossus that is China is bad news for farmers. The general chill it had on the stock market makes us all a little nervous. When Wall Street gets panicky, corporations start having conniption fits.

Out in the everyday world, though, the sky doesn’t fall every time Trump gets indigestion. An exceedingly small percentage of people actually care about building a wall on the Mexican border or making China flinch first in economic chicken. In my world, people worry about the mundane. Where can I find a reliable babysitter? Did the price of gasoline go up again? Will the brakes on my car hold out for another month? Will I get that promotion? Will I be able to pay my mortgage?

Take this case in point from Memphis, where I live. A big corporation is using the legal system like a club to to push a family out of their home. That is a real apocalypse for Christopher Reyes and his family. It’s also one with extended consequences. After all, it’s not just the psychological blow of the legal loss. They’re on the hook for a huge fine, which they almost certainly can’t afford. They must find and secure a new place to live on short notice. It’s hard enough to find a decent place to live when you plan for it. They must actually make the move. As anyone who has ever moved knows, it’s an all-consuming project even when you don’t have small children.

More to the point, this is a story that scares me at a visceral level. Why? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in this country who hasn’t been mistreated by a corporation at some point. Everyday abuses include inaccurate bills, arbitrary warranty denials, and customer service lines staffed by people with no power to help you. As the plight of Christopher Reyes and Sarah Fleming shows, though, it can get a whole lot worse. Big corporations have deep pockets and a frankly terrifying power to ruin your life.

You know what doesn’t scare me? The phantom threat of terrorists posing as refugees. The chances of refugee-terrorists killing me are so stupidly small that worrying about it probably qualifies as clinical paranoia. Terrorists are real, but scarce. They’re like sharks. Sure, sharks are hideously dangerous, but only if you encounter one. There isn’t much chance of that in the landlocked Midwest. By the way, you’re still more likely to die by shark attack than get killed by refugee-terrorists.

How about trade deficits? Surely those scare me. Nope. Trade deficits aren’t inherently a good thing or bad thing. They’re a byproduct of a wide cross-section of factors. Trump’s myopic fixation on our trade deficit with China in terms of goods is driven by politics, not economics. China isn’t the reason manufacturing jobs are disappearing in the US. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing since the 1980’s because we’re transitioning into a post-industrial, service economy. Just as importantly, the kinds of protectionist policies Trump prefers pose risks of their own.

That brings us back to the recurring theme of immigrants as an economic threat to the American way of life. Any rational person must be frightened of that, right? Sorry, that one doesn’t scare me either. While first-generation undocumented immigrants create economic burdens for state and local governments, second and third-generation immigrants contribute hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes. Just as importantly, there is very little evidence that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from citizens. Saying they do is nothing but political grandstanding on a soapbox of fear and hate.

None of that is to say that we don’t live in strange or dangerous times. The world-at-large and the US are in the throes of massive political, social, and economic upheavals. Times of great change are always strange. After all, people can make fortunes from smartphone apps. The CEO of Facebook testified before Congress. A man with no qualifications was elected President of the United States. Hollywood is full of sexual predators. Okay, that one might not be strange, but its exposure is a big change.