BARBS

I am back home after three days at the Elkhart County 4-H Fair, working with my MSNBC.com colleagues on their ongoing Elkhart Project, and one of the bumpiest airplane rides I can remember on my way into LaGuardia Airport this afternoon (and one of the chattiest flight attendants ever: by the time we landed, we’d all been forced to learn that she hopes to have grandchildren, is a cancer survivor, has to call her mother every time she lands, applied for but didn’t get a job at Continental, owns two of her own businesses, and gets a thrill each and every time she flies as if it’s the first time).

The Elkhart Project focuses on the economy and unemployment in one hard-hit community as a way of putting the national struggle in a more personal context. Thus, most of the work I did this week was with an eye towards that issue, although we did post a couple of cute pieces of video on the Elkhart Facebook site.

On our first day at the fair, we asked fairgoers whether and how the recession had affected their experience at the fair, a longtime beloved annual tradition for folks in Elkhart County and beyond. Here’s what some of them told us. See also this longer article on fairs in general as an economic indicator.

The next day, we asked people what question on the economy or health care they’d most like to ask President Obama at the news conference he was to hold that night. They had no shortage of questions.

Finally, we watched the news conference with one family for whom health care is a particularly pressing issue–because they don’t have it. We wondered what they wanted to hear from the President on Wednesday evening, and then, when he was done, what they thought about what they heard. Meet Monica and Alan Cummings and their daughter Abby here.

Our technical resources were quite limited; all the video you see here was shot on a FlipCam, edited by me and a colleague, as well as processed and uploaded by us with some technical trouble-shooting assists from the video team at MSNBC.com headquarters in Redmond. I’ll never claim that any of this is award-winning video, but it was pretty cool to be able to post some 20 video clips in a matter of a few days with very little outside help.

A final word: on this trip, as on others I have taken as a producer and reporter, I was struck yet again by the disconnect between my world and the world I was visiting. When in Elkhart, and especially when sitting in a living room with a family that’s struggling to make ends meet and watching all the “inside the beltway” types ask questions on national t.v., it’s easy to see why so many have antipathy toward the “media elite;” what goes on in the White House press room, and among those of us in the New York City-Washington-Los Angeles media nexus, feels very far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans. We do live in something of a bubble.

On the other hand, so do Elkhartians.  I was asked by one local resident, a father who lost his job some months ago, about why Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is “against” white men. I heard all about why home schooling is the only way to instill “morals” in young people, how “illegal aliens” are taking the jobs of hard-working Americans, and how Barack Obama became President only because African Americans voted for him “just because he’s Black.” This, too, is a cultural mindset. Neither is more “real;” they’re all “real” to those whose perspectives they reflect.

We all live in bubbles of our own making, and let’s face it, we’re generally comfortable there. Maybe we all need to burst a few of our own bubbles.