The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

CONECUH NATIONAL FOREST – It makes me happy to report that it’s 65 degrees in mid-December here about 1,000 miles from Washington, D.C., proving that our climate change escape travel strategy is working. But even here in the woods along the Alabama-Florida line, it’s hard to escape the debate over the impeachment of this reality TV star president.

While the hyper partisan divide that shows up every day on cable television talk shows makes it hard to have much hope for the future of democracy, if you look hard enough, you can still find informed men and women gathering on Saturday mornings for breakfast and calling themselves Democrats, even in a land that the national media dismissed long ago as hopelessly and conservatively red.

The Covington County Democrats in Andalusia, Alabama, may be outnumbered by the Republicans who control the local government here. But they do not seem ready to give up on American democracy just yet.

While the Alabama Democratic Party in Montgomery still seems hopelessly split, and not in a position to help much in the upcoming 2020 elections, Democrats all over the state still have the special election victory in 2017 to hold on to, and a Democrat in the United States Senate to defend.

The pundits in Washington and Birmingham may not give U.S. Senator Doug Jones much of a chance to keep his seat for a full six-year term past 2020. But that will not stop the Democrats here and around the state from working for his reelection, or continuing to try to educate their friends and family on Facebook about why Donald Trump is so bad for the country.

It takes some knowledge of history to understand all of this, something that appears to be lacking in about half the population, or at least a third of the people, the one’s who still support Trump even in the face of overwhelming evidence of his corruption, abuse of power, violation of the Constitution and election laws, obstruction of justice and Congress, witness tampering, even bribery.

You don’t have to necessarily hold a college degree to find out the truth in this country, but you do have to pay attention a little bit, do some reading, and follow something besides the right-wing radio talk show hosts and commentators on Fox News.

I may hold three college degrees and most of a fourth, but the way I have followed the news for the past 40 years may be just as important as any textbook. I still wake up on Sunday morning and read the New York Times and the Washington Post online, as I watch CBS “Sunday Morning” and “Face the Nation.” These days I find myself using the CBSN app on one of my iPhones to watch, as well as the NPR app to listen to National Public Radio news some during the week.

For people who live in rural areas where you can’t pick up an NPR station on the radio or CBS on a broadcast TV antenna, and you can’t afford to pay for satellite TV, you can still keep up with these things if there is a cell phone tower in range. That’s the case here.

Look, I know all about the problems with the so-called mainstream media and have been writing about them for many years. I have seen the New York Times go through periods when it seemed you couldn’t trust it, like back during the runup to the war in Iraq in the Bush years. I have watched ups and downs at the Post and CBS News too, and other networks, and spent the past 15 years trying to build something reliable on the web to help people stay informed at least about the biggest stories — for free online.

The national press, the Columbia Journalism Review and others write all the time about news deserts and the digital divide. But what are they really doing about it? We have not been sitting around waiting for some miracle out of the sky to fix these things. We have been working as hard as it is possible to work to build something to help people understand what’s really going on in the world, often with an inadequate budget and snarky criticism from people with English degrees from Harvard.

I wish I could offer people some hope for their local newspapers, but I just don’t see much going on there to recommend. For example, most people in the Pensacola area will never find this out, but their local paper, the Pensacola News-Journal, was owned by Gannett until recently, the mass chain of newspapers led by the flagship paper USA Today. No more. It just got taken over by Gatehouse Media, and more layoffs of reporters and editors is sure to follow.

I tried looking at it recently to see what’s going on there, but a pay wall is in place that only allows readers to see three stories a month. And quite frankly, I didn’t see three stories on the front page worth reading anyway. They are just not going to pay real money for news gathering anymore. Gatehouse is the Sinclair of print news, and will use their web properties for conservative propaganda purposes. They are not going to do a goddamned thing to help us save democracy or the human species on this planet, so why would anyone bemoan their ultimate demise?

We need something better, but unfortunately, for the past 30 years those of a conservative bent have made most of the money and are willing to spend billions of dollars to get their libertarian point of view out, while the left in this country is still so divided amongst themselves that there does not seem to be much hope of the Democrats ever getting together on anything, even a presidential nominee for 2020.

So I am turning to a difference survival strategy, working to develop a network of help for progressive, organic farmers. In addition to the Democratic breakfast I attended on Saturday, I spent part of the afternoon down in Baldwin County, Alabama, checking out the work of members of the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. They held their annual retreat at Camp Beckwith.

While Trump’s tariffs and trade war is driving more and more American farmers out of business, these farmers are not waiting around for government handouts to save themselves or us. They are banding together to try to help educate each other, and to find ways to grow the food we will need to survive for the next few decades, even as climate change and global warming continue to disrupt the environment and the economy.

We need people focused on finding places to go to escape the worst effects of climate change, something that now seems inevitable since our government officials can’t get together on solutions. We will need remote places with fresh water and local produce, far from the chaos of urban centers where a crisis in the power grid or the banking system could result in widespread human disasters and upheaval.

This is the story that will occupy more of my thoughts and time as the days grow shorter and darker and the Trump Republicans and their loyal followers remain resistant to facts.

Not that long ago, I wrote that we should be seeing a new age of Aquarius after 2020, with the voting population demographics shift away from old, white racists in the South. The problem is, Donald Trump came along and woke them up from their long slumber, and now he has them educating their children to be racists and Nazis, even the American Boy Scouts.

We have known in communications research going all the way back to how the Germans were using the media during World War I that propaganda is a powerful thing. We know that a lie travels around the world far faster than any honest truth. But since the so-called Greatest Generation helped defeat the Nazis in World War II, we have always thought that a free press would save us from bringing back monarchy and dictatorship to these shores.

But it is now not just lapping at the shores here like the rising seas are eroding beaches. It resides inside the White House, with the commander-in-chief’s fingers within reach of the nuclear football.

If the Republicans want to help us save this country, they will find 20 votes in the Senate to impeach Trump, remove him from office before he destroys us, and restore some semblance of sanity to our republic. This may be our last chance.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Let’s all do an impeachment victory dance. Or go down trying.