{"id":1294,"date":"2016-11-18T06:01:13","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T14:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1294"},"modified":"2016-11-17T19:06:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T03:06:43","slug":"lets-all-take-a-breath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2016\/11\/18\/lets-all-take-a-breath\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s All Take a Breath"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a direct product of my upbringing in Bisbee, Arizona, not only as a result of how my parents raised me, but also because of the quality of the teachers who taught in the local schools.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today I\u2019m thinking of one that I\u2019ve never mentioned before, my eighth grade Civics teacher, Mrs. Hennessey.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our class was tough on teachers. \u00a0Several of them died shortly after our class passed through, and Mrs. Hennessey was one of those. \u00a0She retired after our eighth grade graduation and died, as I recall, within a matter of months of retirement. But here\u2019s why I\u2019m thinking of her today.<\/span><\/p>\n

The year I was in the eighth grade there was a particularly divisive election for student body officers at Greenway School. \u00a0I have no idea who won or lost, but I do remember there were a lot of hard feelings generated by the outcome of that election. In the midst of that, Mrs. Hennessey sat us down as a class and told us that we needed to learn to be good winners and good losers. (The idea of trophies for participation had not yet come into vogue.)<\/span><\/p>\n

This country could use a bit of Mrs. Hennessey\u2019s advice along about now. Maybe she could send it out in a tweet, because that\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing right now\u2014bad winners and bad losers.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you look at the votes, numerically things are about fifty\/fifty, give or take a couple of million. So what does that mean? It doesn\u2019t mean that the half of the country who happens to disagree with you is automatically, evil, stupid, racist, xenophobic or whatever. I\u2019m sorry, calling your opponents names is so \u2026 well \u2026 junior highish! Hillary was right when she said, \u201cWe\u2019re stronger together,\u201d because we are! It was all of us pulling together who defeated Hitler and Japan. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I try to keep politics out of my books because it\u2019s clear to me that my readers come from both sides of the political divide. From a practical business point of view, it seems improbably stupid to offend either one. For one thing, I believe people read popular fiction as an escape from the real world, politics included. <\/span><\/p>\n

If fiction is supposed to provide entertainment, news is supposed to provide just that\u2014NEWS not diatribes. \u00a0And that brings me back to the teachings of yet another of my Bisbee teachers, Rachel Riggins, the long ago journalism teacher and newspaper advisor at Bisbee High School. \u00a0She made it clear that if we wanted to editorialize, we needed to write an editorial, and if we were reporting news, we needed to stick with the five W\u2019s\u2014who, what, where, when, and sometimes why.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think many folks in the media, including the NFL, have lost sight of that. If you consistently trash one side or the other, guess what? People are going to start voting with their remotes. \u00a0They\u2019ll stop watching. They\u2019ll stop clicking on articles. They\u2019ll stop visiting websites. And what will happen then? Advertising dollars will start drying up. It seems to me that disrespecting approximately half the people in the country is not a good way of doing business.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you may have already deduced, I\u2019m one of those dreaded Republicans\u2014a deplorable as it were. But I\u2019m also someone who burned a bra once (It was a nursing bra which I tossed on a barbecue grill after I cooked dinner which meant that, as a bra burning, it was pretty much a mixed message!) I\u2019m also someone who walked ten miles for the equal rights amendment in Tucson in August on the occasion of Susan B. Anthony\u2019s birthday.<\/span><\/p>\n

Does my \u201couting\u201d myself as an R. mean that some of my readers will immediately place me on their \u201cI\u2019ll never read another\u201d lists? \u00a0Probably. By the way, those \u201cNever read another\u201d folks come from both sides of the aisle. Like the lady who stopped reading because Joanna and Butch released helium balloons at her parents\u2019 funerals. Didn\u2019t I understand how bad helium balloons are for the environment? (Never mind that these were entirely fictional balloons in an entirely fictional environment!) And then there was the guy who stopped reading my books because Ali Reynolds\u2019s butler Leland Brooks was gay and I was \u201cpromoting the gay agenda.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s all just step back for a moment, and let this country settle in with its change in leadership. I don\u2019t think things are going to be either as good or as bad as anyone is saying. Oh, and if you aren\u2019t registered and didn\u2019t vote, then sit down, shut up, and stop deriding the people who did.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mrs. Hennessey never said that to our class back then, but I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if she\u2019d stand up and say it now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Somebody certainly needs to.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a direct product of my upbringing in Bisbee, Arizona, not only as a result of how my parents raised me, but also because of the quality of the teachers who taught in the local schools. Today I\u2019m thinking of one that I\u2019ve never mentioned before, my eighth grade Civics teacher, Mrs. Hennessey. Our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-kS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1296,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions\/1296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}