Remember that time when…

Remember that time when the media broke the story of that Trump scandal that should have disqualified him from the Presidency, and he said "fake news," and his followers believed him, and the whole thing blew over? No. Not that scandal. The other one. No, not that one. The one after that. Oh, yeah, he said, "fake news" after all of them. And many of us (myself included) made the mistake of thinking the scandal was the thing people should be focusing on. You know, the abuse of office, the breaking the law, the violating the Constitution. But we were wrong. It turns out the real scandal was getting folks to believe they couldn't trust anyone but him. Now there are people holding rallies that will cause some of them to get sick and die and others to get sick and kill, and they are doing it because they've been taught to distrust the media. Sure, "the media" (which is not really some monolithic liberal conspiracy) gets stories wrong. They do that all the time. But they frequently get stories right. And teaching people they can't trust truth-tellers and should only trust the man who has told more fact-checked, debunked, demonstrable lies than any human in our species' history is turning out to have life-and-death consequences. Yes, we need to get rid of this terrible President. But that's just a step. We also need to decide to embrace reality again. As long as we have two versions of reality, the one based on sometimes-wrong reporting and fact-checking and science, and the one based on always-wrong conspiracy theories and outright lies, we aren't a country. We aren't even existing in the same universe. And where those universes touch, they will grate against each other, and the friction will lead to frustration and hatred and, yes, death. There is no reasonable debate, no common ground, when we don't even have shared facts. Trump has thrived in this chaos, but once he's gone, how will we rediscover a shared view of reality? I don't know. And I'm very afraid of how many people will die while we try to figure it out.