Imagine yourself in a military boat, hands on a mounted machine gun at the bow, surrounded by members of U.S. Special Operations forces.

You cruise around the bay, rat-a-tat-tatting .50-caliber “blank” bullets, and just for fun, you decide to turn the gun toward a bunch of journalists watching your exhibition of lethal power.

The journalists dive for cover and “cry like little girls.”

Funny huh?

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, a Democrat, has been getting laughs with that story. It’s mostly fiction because, according to the Tampa Bay Times, while he did get to play soldier with the machine gun, he didn’t point it at anyone in particular and nobody actually ducked for cover.

Still, he uses this punchline: It was “great payback (for journalists). I love it.”

Last week, a tech millionaire in Montana running for the U.S. House of Representatives decided he didn’t like a question a Guardian reporter asked him about health care, so he grabbed the reporter and slammed him to the ground, then punched him a few times, yelling “Get the hell out of here!”

Republican Greg Gianforte then released a statement saying the “liberal” journalist caused the altercation by holding a recorder near the candidate’s face and asking “badgering” questions.

A day after beating up the reporter, Gianforte drubbed a folk-singing poet in the election, applying an atomic wedgie to hopeful pacifists everywhere.

Even though three major state newspapers hastily pulled their endorsements of Gianforte after the assault, some fellow Republicans and constituents showed ambivalence or even support for his aggressive actions, including one person heckling CNN reporter Kyung Lah with the taunt that she was lucky “someone doesn’t pop one of you.”

California Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter tossed in this knee-slapper: “It’s not appropriate behavior. Unless the reporter deserved it.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, then decided to show off the target he had been plugging full of bullets at a shooting range, adding in jest and pointing to the holes: “I’m gonna carry this around in case I see any reporters.”

This sort of behavior might be reality in parts of the world, from the Kremlin to Tehran to Pyongyang. In the United States, though, where a free press and free speech are protected by the First Amendment, and are considered core parts of our national identity, we tend to think we are different.

In terms of the World Press Freedom index, though, we’re now actually No. 43, ranked lower than such beacons of democracy as Chile, Lithuania and even the mostly Muslim country of Burkina Faso in West Africa. The imminence of this threat to our freedoms can be seen clearly just south of our border, where Mexican journalists are being murdered at a frenetic pace.

The resurrection of partisan media; the often unfounded but growing perceptions of bias in media; the scourge of fake news, and nearly daily degradations from President Trump all have been dividing us as a society.

As factions, we are easier to subjugate and conquer through the triangulation of bullying, propaganda and — in a 21st century twist — overstimulation of our information channels with loud noises meant to desensitize, disenfranchise and confuse us. Crises occur so fast we can’t process one before the next arrives. Information overload, including streams of unreliable news mixed with real journalism, creates feelings of powerlessness and despair.

You are lucky that there still are people in America working to bring you high-quality and truthful information.

Civil Beat has been addressing “news literacy” issues in Hawaii, including offering a recent event at Manoa Public Library focused on “Navigating the Flood of Information.” Afterward, an audience member approached me and asked what internet filters I would recommend to help control or eliminate fake news.

I thought that was a reasonable and practical question in today’s tech-oriented context, but I also found it  comical to think of how a computer program might go about solving that particular problem. There is no easy way to do this.

My general advice might be to seek out multiple and independent stories, from diverse and reliable journalists, and then read until you no longer are learning any new information from each additional source.

But really, we all need to take personal responsibility for our use of the internet. Journalists are not forcing you to click on questionable links. You’re doing it. Real journalists aren’t circulating fake news. Those stories are on your social media channels; you’re the publisher of that channel, so the responsibility is yours.

Being news literate and being a responsible publisher takes work.

You are lucky, too, that there still are people in America working to bring you high-quality and truthful information. Professional journalists also are, like anyone else, dealing with households to maintain, children to raise and bills to pay.

They could earn money in many easier ways. Instead, they choose to work for you, often leaping into hostile situations to ask the questions you would like to ask — if you were as brave and resourceful and dedicated as they are to public discourse.

Journalists don’t make the news, they report on it. They don’t create the story of public interest. They ask questions about it.

So when a reporter (as your proxy) gets disparaged, you are getting disparaged. When a reporter gets attacked, you are being attacked.

When a person is running for federal office gets asked a simple question about a topic of broad public interest, and he decides to bodyslam the questioner, what are you going to do? Stick up for the bully?