Nancy Nall sums it up perfectly: “It’s just as well that the weekend is coming, as I need to unplug from the internet and stop paying attention to politics for a while. I’m starting to feel that old sourness, the simmer I maintained from roughly 2004 through 2008 … no, through now, that pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling.”
The media is addicted to fear-mongering and right-wing propaganda. Public discourse in the United States is hysterical, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and anti-science. It’s tempting to withdraw entirely, to follow the advice Einstein gave to a young man in Munich in 1933: “Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich’s surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.”
Of course, you can’t pretend the ducks aren’t pecking you to death when they are, in fact, pecking you to death. Einstein himself knew better: he got his ass out of Germany while he still could and engaged himself in the fight against fascism on the side of the United States and its allies.
You can’t engage the ducks … the birthers, the Obama-is-a-Muslim crowd, the legislators who want poor people and minorities to starve in the streets, the voters who act against their own interests by siding with the aristocrats. You can’t talk them around, reason with them, or educate them. They have always, and will always be, the way they are now. On a personal level, it’s best to follow Einstein’s advice: blot out any interest in the actions of these creatures. But on a political level, you have to be willing to fight them. When the ducks gain control of government and the media, they become a serious threat. And they will peck us to death if we let them.