Posted on 03/10/2018 1:13:43 PM PST by Kaslin
In today’s 24-hours news cycle, many people wish they could isolate themselves from reality for a variety of reasons. For some, it would be absolutely heaven to block all news. It seems like a far-fetched idea, but one liberal in Ohio has actually done it since the day after the presidential election 2016 in an experiment known as "The Blockade." The New York Times published the story today.
“Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics.
Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.
He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.
“It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.
“I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio. “But it’s only so diverting.”
The piece, written by Sam Dolnick, details how exactly Hagerman came to this point in his life.
“For a guy who has gone to great lengths to essentially plug his ears, Mr. Hagerman sure does talk a lot. He is witty and discursive, punctuating his stories with wild-eyed grins, exaggerated grimaces and more than the occasional lost thread.
I recently spent two days visiting his farm on the condition that I not bring news from the outside world. As the sun set over his porch, turning the rolling hills pink then purple then blue, he held forth, jumping from English architecture to the local pigs’ eating habits to his mother’s favorite basketball team to the philosophy of Kant. He can go days without seeing another soul.
This life is still fairly new. Just a few years ago, he was a corporate executive at Nike (senior director of global digital commerce was his official, unwieldy title) working with teams of engineers to streamline the online shopping experience. Before that, he had worked digital jobs at Walmart and Disney.
“I worked 12-, 14-hour days,” he said. “The calendar completely booked.”
But, three years ago he quit that job and purchased land in his home state of Ohio. Now his life is completely different.
Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. To make sure he doesn’t overhear idle chatter, he often listens to white noise through his headphones. (He used to listen to music, “but stray conversation can creep in between songs.”)
At Donkey Coffee, everyone knows his order, and they know about The Blockade. “Our baristas know where he’s at so they don’t engage him on topics that would make him uncomfortable,” said Angie Pyle, the coffee shop’s co-owner.
Hagerman really has prevented any news from entering his life, reports Dolnick.
“Conversations with Mr. Hagerman can have a Rip Van Winkle quality. He spoke several times about his sister, Bonnie, an assistant professor, who lives in, of all places, Charlottesville, Va.
While he and I were talking, I looked over at him at every mention of Charlottesville to see if the name of the city, home to perhaps the ugliest weekend of the Trump era to date, made him flinch.
“So, do you associateCharlottesville” — I would say the name deliberately and with emphasis — “with anything besides your sister?”
He didn’t bite. I think he really didn’t know aboutthe Nazis.
Later, he pointed to a house on a hill and said that before the election, the neighbor had decorated his lawn with an effigy of Hillary Clinton behind bars. I wanted to point out that the recently unveiled Mueller indictment found that a Russian trollhad paid for a Hillary impersonator at a Florida rally. But I bit my tongue — Mr. Hagerman didn’t know about Mueller, or Russia, or trolls.”
The entire piece, to be point blank, is pretty boring. We get it. The guy does not watch the news nor engage in politics. Most Townhall readers probably would want all liberals to adopt that kind of life style.
His entire experiment does have somewhat of a point, though. He is refurbishing the land that he has bought and will eventually donate it for public use.
"Mr. Hagerman sees this land as his life’s work. He plans to restore it, protect it, live on it and then preserve it for the public. “I will never sell this land,” he said.
He wouldn’t put it exactly this way, but he talks about the land in part as penance for the moral cost of his Blockade. He has come to believe that being a news consumer doesn’t enhance society. He also believes that restoring a former coal mine and giving it to the future does.
“I see it as a contribution that has civic relevance that aligns with my passions and what I do well,” Mr. Hagerman said. “I’m going to donate it. It’s going to take most of my net worth. That’s what I’m going to spend the rest of my money on.”
Oh, well. Most would say this seems like a weird waste of time, but to each their own. I guess.
I’ve known people like this before. In the early 80’s I knew of a girl who hated all news. She wouldn’t watch it on tv. She turned it off if it came on the radio. She would even hold her hand up to block her view of newspapers in vending machines. As you can imagine she wasn’t much of a conversationalist.
[“I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio.]
How often does the son-of-a-mailman Kasich come by?
“Actually, there are millions of people like this. They’re just not that interested, and have better things to do with their lives.”
What’s funny is seeing the lying media shooting their own feet without realizing it. On the one hand, they can only showcase a lunatic anti-Trumper, giving the worst presentation possible of leftists while the first aim is trying to bash Trump. On the other hand, they can only showcase a lunatic anti-Trumper, because they would never contemplate the idea of tarnishing the image of their favorite black hero by showing a nevrotic anti-Obamaer.
Yes. I did the same thing right after Obama was re-elected. No news. No Rush. No Free Republic. I purposely avoided even looking at the newspaper headlines in the food stores. I figured whatever that POS was doing to my country, I was better off not knowing it.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
Trump’s background in real estate is a definite plus.
He is living rent-free in this buffoon’s head (and thousands like it). 24 X 7 X 365 (or 366).
He can go days without seeing another soul.
I had a twenty-something tell me once she didn’t watch news on TV and didn’t read newspapers. This was before the internet. She probably can’t avoid it, now.
I’m applying the same censorship I did when Bambi was president. FreeRepublic and Liberty News on the internet, FoxNews on TV, the Patriot Channel (125) on Sirius/XM radio in my vehicles. Nothing has changed with the change of Administrations.
I feel the same as you, except for that part about reading FR without manipulation. American Thinker, Canada Free Press, the Federalist, and most other blogs are in the manipulation business.
Try an experiment. Read an article, or a fairly long comment, skipping all the adjectives. Then read it with the adjectives. The difference in how you feel reading it the first time as opposed to the second, is the degree to which the author is trying to manipulate you.
Same here. I like to hear the leftists weep, but other than that I’m not interested.
Critical thinking skills are not taught anymore, and most people don’t develop them on their own. Taking your example, don’t even read the content of the article - start by examining the metadata: who wrote it, what is their background or expertise, where is it published and what is the reputation of that entity for fairness or bias, is it current and does it cite original sources or reference facts that are verifiable or is it just the opinion of “unnamed sources. Etc.
The vast majority of what gets posted on FR is pure crap nowadays. Blogs masquerading as “news” and being posted as such, authors who are a year or two out of college and don’t know anything or have any experience, or writers who when you read their bios have written about everything under the sun and thus are clearly not experts themselves but just regurgitating or soft-plagarizing to fill space or earn a paycheck as a “content originator”.
Back when there were three networks and no cable, we got a half-hour of national news every day and most of it was actual “news” from bureaus around the world. Original work, albeit sometimes not without bias. Now, what is called “news” is just opinion and hearsay, along with a generous measure of BS.
Well stated!
Not being informed beats being misinformed by daily fake news.
Metadata helps predict the author’s choice of facts to present and interpret. It’s validating the source. However, the indication of manipulation won’t be found there. The writing itself is meant to infuse his/her point of view. The metadata can tell you where they are coming from, but not what they are doing.
Probably describes half of America.
Dude, you can do better.
CC
I wondered how a pig farmer could be so liberal - then I see he worked for Nike and Disney.
This dude is a Pig Farmer!
Nuff said.
Good, I guess that means he will not vote in the midterm elections.
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