Back to School

I was on the fence about which Lifelong Learning course to take when I went to the preview session a couple of weeks ago. I didn't think I would have the slightest interest in a discussion of 'fake news' until I heard the three presenters, a political scientist, a pollster and the former editorial director of the Press Democrat give an introduction at Sonoma State  a couple of weeks ago. 

Our friends Anne and Harold are here visiting as we are just about the half way point between their home in Corvallis Oregon and their children in Southern California. They arrived just in time for Ann to jump into my car to drive to Sonoma State for the first class of the series.

I had allowed what I thought was more than ample time for us to drive there, find a parking space in one of the multitude of parking lots ringing the campus, purchase a parking ticket and have a leisurely walk to the lecture hall. As it turned out, there was a 20 minute delay on a narrow mountain road with no way to turn around, and no warning before we passed the point of no return; all the parking lots appeared to be full even after some futile trolling around; the space we finally found was miles from the ticket machine which refused to cough up a ticket neither for love, money or a credit card, and when it finally coughed up a ticket, I had to sprint back to the car and put it on the dashboard.

We missed the introduction of the speakers and the pollster was well into his round of graphs, charts, maps and predictions when we arrived. Thank goodness there was no lack of seats. That's the pollster in the front of the room taking questions from the audience. He was very quick, fairly interesting, and basically implied that the coming midterm elections are too close to call and that our hope lies with the young people and the suburban housewives.

The editorial director of the local newspaper told lots of stories, gave lots of examples of fake news, both credible and incredible, and promised to make us all more discriminating users of social media by the time he was finished. 

It was all quite interesting, and by the time it was over, I had almost regained my composure, before  hiking back to the car and driving home by a different route.