The great song from 1944, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,”
You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positiveE-lim-i-nate the negativeLatch on to the affirmativeDon’t mess with Mr. In-Between
It had a lot going for it. Mainly the truth. There’s a maxim in life that you get what you put your attention on. Give the good things attention and get more of them, and the corollary is pretty obvious.
What does this have to do with the thought pattern of the far-right faction in our country’s political arena? A lot.
In case anyone failed to notice, Donald Trump’s entire campaign is based on accentuating the negative. Listening to him at any given moment you would get the idea that we’re being invaded by armed hordes. That some of our cities are owned by Venezuelan gangs. That crime is so rampant we are afraid to leave our homes. There’s no food to buy. The economy is in tatters. Of course none of these things are true by direct observation.
But when you’ve got no policy intent other than revenge and retribution in mind, you have to get people into an anger or fear frame of mind. And then from there we’re supposed to feel hopeless because “nothing is working” and “we need a new solution.”
Next it is a short hop, skip and jump to “maybe those brown shirt guys in Germany had the right idea after all.”
This is where the “I alone can handle it” pitch fits into the picture. It is the same old picture.
And in all of this we’re supposed to ignore the fact that the “law and order” party—what Republicans like to call themselves—expects us to believe that a criminal will fix all these things right up. Seriously?
This is classic. The man with the candy store gets his windows broken. The thugs that broke them then magically appear and demand to be paid to “prevent” it from happening again.
Trump is trying to get us to hire him again to prevent the violence, crime, economic strife and problems that he fostered. That would factually be the worst hiring decision in nearly 250 years.
It is easy to accentuate the positive, all you have to do is look. It is there. Life has its ups and downs, no question. People from the tip of Florida to the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky have just had a lot of negative hit them hard in the form of Hurricane Helene. And in every direction people are rushing in to help. That’s a huge positive.
But, according to Republican thought dating back to Reagan, the worst thing to happen in a disaster is for the government to show up to help. According to Heather Cox Richardson:
President Joe Biden approved emergency declarations for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina before Helene made landfall. Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, did not ask for such a declaration until this evening, instead proclaiming September 27 a “voluntary Day of Prayer and Fasting.” Observers pointed out that with people stuck on a hospital roof in the midst of catastrophic flooding in his state, maybe an emergency declaration would be more on point.
Meanwhile FEMA did not wait for the disaster to be over to act:
The federal government sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, as well as about 8,000 members of the U.S. Coast Guard and teams from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide emergency power. It provided two health and medical task forces to help local hospitals and critical care facilities, and sent in more than 2.7 million meals, 1.6 million liters of water, 50,000 tarps, 10,000 cots, 20,000 blankets, 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and 40,000 gallons of gasoline to provide supplies for those hit by the catastrophe.
I’d say that was a hell of a lot of positive in the face of a monstrous negative.
One of the reasons Trump’s messages of negative seem to take hold is that they are given credence by media outlets that are not doing their jobs. They are treating this election like any other rather than the most pivotal in our nation’s history. “Polls” continually show it to be a “close” race. And we’re supposed to “stay tuned” for updates that are more of the same because our clicks and eyeballs generate revenue. Journalistic integrity is thus plowed under and Trump gets to spread more negative.
Do you realize that ignoring Trump is a valid and highly workable solution? There is no law that requires us to continually have our attention yanked from the positive and slammed into his negatives. And there’s a bonus: Trump hates being ignored more than just about anything, well except for confronting his crimes in court.
We can concentrate our attention on the positive in our daily lives and so generate more of it, and eliminating the negative is part of that formula.
Marty Kassowitz
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
