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Are You Aware? News from the Heartland
This is part IV in our “Rural America” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. It is almost a golden rule of campaign journalism: Find a small-town restaurant packed with white conservative voters, and ask what their hopes are for America. The restaurant patrons enthusiastically support the Republican candidate and bemoan the direction of our country and her values. After the pancakes are eaten and the coffee cups drained, the intrepid reporter books it back to the big city. We watched this scenario play out in the election of 2016, where a majority of rural Americans voted for Trump, many of them expressing the thought that big…
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Why I Am Paying Attention
I’ll be honest — I haven’t always paid attention to what was happening in the world. There was a time when I didn’t care much about what was happening in politics or on the news. I was focused on my own life. What was happening in the White House or on the five o’clock news didn’t seem to affect me very much. There was a time when I would use the same excuses I hear many people using today: The news is too negative. Politics are a joke. The media is a mess. There’s nothing I can do to change any of it, anyway. I don’t have time for any…
