I am very depressed but also very angry

[emsimon33]

I had a discussion with a friend last night. My friend is from Vietnam but, since marrying an American serviceman after the war, has been an American citizen living in the U.S. She is a very warm and giving person. For example, she supports an orphanage in Vietnam and is always doing for others.

She made a statement last night that Obama thinks he is a movie star and that the economy and all the homeless people are his fault...that he should "get over himself" and take responsibility for the huge debt and the poor economy.

I explained that I am not happy with Obama for a variety of reasons (single payer never given a chance and TPP for example), but that what she was accusing him of was simply not true. As we spoke, it became clear that she was repeating what she had heard on Fox and whenever I tried to present the facts, she would rebutt that she was just a little housewife (which isn't true as she has been a very successful business woman for a number of businesses which she has started) and that her beliefs are based on her observations.

Her observations included offering a man panhandling outside of Walmart in Paso Robles, CA, $15 an hour to pull weeds and do other gardening chores for her and she would "also fix him lunch" (he refuesed her offer) and offering a woman whose tennis shoes in the Jimba class at the fitness center were held together with rubber bands $15 an hour (and free lunch) to clean her house every other week (the woman said "yes" but never showed). To my friend this and a couple of other randon examples proves that people in the U.S. only want a governemnt hand out. If they really wanted a job they would accept anything.

I confessed that I had no explanation for the examples she provided but that we could end "government" handouts pretty qucikly if we raised the minumum wage to $11 or $12 per hour. Her retort was classic Fox: "Give them that and they will just ask for more and more."

Nothing I said could change her mind and I sadly realized how very toxic Fox is (not that I haven't hated them for years). Here was a compassionate, warm, highly successful and educated person who has fallen victim to the Fox propaganda. Now rather than seeing those living in poverty often despite working three jobs paying minimum wage as victims, Fox has molded her perceptions so that she sees them as lazy leeches that do not want to work. To my friend's way of thinking, those less fortune are victims of their own lack of initiative and unwillingness to do hard labor and make correct life choices. No matter how many facts and examples I presented in my argument, there was no changing my friend's mind and she made that very clear.

Fox is a greater poison that mercury, any drug, or any... . How it brainwashes would make the Soviets at the heighth of the Cold War and the the Nazis jealous. It must be stopped if we ever to return to being a compassionate and civilized society again.

I apologize for any misspellings. I am on a desktop computer in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and its spell checker has underlined everything in red as it is spell checking for Vietnamese!