So I'm in Home Depot...

[tomm2thumbs]

I'm standing in the caulk aisle (put your puns away) and within about 4 minutes, I am interrupted by three different people, each of them trying to secretly hawk themselves to help with whatever caulk-project I'm working on. They don't say 'excuse me', they just start talking about how they can help me and forcibly try to give me their cards. Three. In a row. For an easily distracted person like me, this is like being hit on the head with a rubber squeaky hammer.

So I go to the paint desk and tell the 4 employees standing 20 feet away, simultaneously, 'there are at least three people here trying to sell services in your store to shoppers, can you do something about it?' They all shrug and say 'we can't really do anything.' Obviously, they don't care enough to suggest I talk to a manager, just that they've got other things to do and the fact that someone is using their store to solicit business is of no concern to them.

Nice. So I respond, 'you basically don't care is what you are saying' and turn away, only to hear someone say '... gotta call O'Reilly and get him in here...' I pause. I'm thinking, is that guy talking to me? And he continues 'you gotta get FoxNews and O'Reilly in here'.

I turn back to see the guy saying it - a large African American guy who keeps talking – 'it just happened to me too.' Oh good. Someone who understands my pain. So I engage with a little back and forth about how the workers obviously don't care. And he surprises me with 'Yup, FoxNews - they can take care of it – you gotta get them in here. It's all these illegals.' So he goes on, telling me how liberal California is, how 'these people stick together', and how 'Obamacare' is going to ruin this country.

Yes.

He went from being annoyed in Home Depot by someone soliciting their services to 'Obamacare' and liberal America. But that was only for starters. He then began to complain about 'these two Jews I work for, who are both gay', how they enable this kind of thing to happen, and went on and on about how liberal this state was, and how FoxNews is the only one who can do anything about it. He repeated 'Bill O'Reilly would do something - gotta get him in here.'

So, I realized after hearing his rant that we were both coming from different worlds.

For me, the fact that someone was trying to solicit to me within a Home Depot was a problem with the store and the manager... but to him, the problem was Obama, liberals and all the hispanics helping each other out behind the scenes. He even said that if 'Obamacare' gets through, all 'these people' without Social Security numbers will just tell the person behind the desk 'I don't have a card' and they'll say 'don't worry, I know how to fix this so you can get medical' and the rest of us will be paying for it. He had totally already decided how this was going to play out. Thanks to FoxNews.

I inserted mentions about the health care costs in the US vs the world currently being the highest and we still don't cover everyone, and insurance companies profits taking money from treatment, and the standard facts, but obviously this was falling on deaf ears. (Oh yes, he also managed to drop the term 'socialism' a few times -- the first time I have personally encountered this, but it happens just like you see it on TV!) Well, he started to suspect my own 'librul' leanings and figured out he had been complaining about libruls to a librul. He turned away - I must have been a lost cause now.

My take away was helpful though.

The thing FoxNews has figured out is that when the ill-informed people in this country (or as FoxNews knows them - 'their audience') get angry, they immediately can be trained and triggered to blame something unrelated to the problem. And further, they are conditioned to dig in and ramp it up. Make it big. Grow the story.

So his annoyance about someone accosting him in the store was somehow the result of liberal American government and a hispanic conspiracy (along with the Jews and the gays), all working together to cause him grief. It was, however, NOT related to Home Depot's store manager, a lack of training of supervisors, or a group of disinterested employees.

Definitely not about that.

So I share this only because it really struck me that no matter what happens... if Obama discovers a cure for cancer, or turns water into fuel, or drops a gold bar into everyone's lap, FoxNews will always be digging into the personal frustrations of their viewers to help them find a way to blame everything ELSE, no matter how small, on liberal Americans and 'the way this country is heading' under Obama.

My answer to the soliciting was to leave the store and take my business elsewhere. I bet his answer was to write an email to O'Reilly and then sit down for a full evening's worth of rants and attacks, hoping that one day soon, his little incident, emailed to the show, would appear on the TV screen for all to see. FoxNews and O'Reilly would make things right again. Meanwhile he'll be soaking deeper and deeper into his FoxNews-reinforced bath of blame, hate and anger.

Kinda makes you wonder why they even leave the house.