Politics has devolved into a mud slinging, drunken brawl
with participants screaming insults and spreading wild rumors taken up as
gospel truth and then spread throughout the land via the internet.
Many people are lazy; upon hearing or reading some
extremely incendiary information, the more outrageous the better, they simply
reproduce the misleading propaganda and pass it on over the ‘net to hundreds,
even thousands of people.
Today I was “de-friended” on facebook by someone who was
apparently upset that I found the article they had posted was false on
snopes.com and I commented on it. That tells me this person and most likely
many of the readers have no interest in whether they are providing accurate
information but simple want something to hang their noose on.
In this case it was the bastardly, dastardly Obamacare.
The article insinuates that the bill that was passed has language that calls
for mandatory implantation of tracking devices into citizens.
According to snopes, where I quickly found the
information about this article, the bill that was passed no longer has the
particular language that referenced implanted devices but even it if did, the
actual intent of the passage was to be able to track information from
electronic devices including implanted devices LIKE PACEMAKERS…
There is a veritable thick gooey soup of lies, tricks and
hateful messages seeping and oozing into every nook and cranny of our cyber
world. Abortions cause cancer, gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage,
people don’t have jobs because they are lazy, people don’t have healthcare
because they are stupid, our country is a Christian nation and all other beliefs
are here only to dupe the citizenry and pry them away from those solid
Christian values that only they have.
I’ve been around long enough to have seen the best and
the worst of local and national politics but never have I lived through a time
when this country was so deeply divided. It probably hasn’t been this bad since
the War Between the States.
No matter what happened in the political arena in
elections past, ordinary citizens would pack up their tents, go home, visit
with their neighbors and get on with the business of living. Not so today – the
level of animosity and disrespect for governance has not abated in four years.
So, I can’t help but wonder if this country is so broken,
if the people are so bereft of moral standards and common sense that we may
never be able to get along again.
And,if that’s the case, how will it be resolved? Another civil war? Two new
countries?
What a depressing state of affairs….
Rocky,
ReplyDeleteI was particularly struck by that judge who's in hot water for forwarding a vicious racist joke about the president (and his mother) -- to paraphrase, he suggested that he didn't send it as racist but only because it was "anti-Obama." Hmmm -- I guess so as long as it's "anti-Obama," anything goes: even sneering racism is fair game. Just so it reinforces one's status as "anti-Obama" -- that's all that matters.
Great post rocky. The subtext of the horrific division of the American polity is corporate control and money. Atomization of rational discourse, the intentional distortion of reality and the creation of insecurity and fear have been the methods of choice for big money control of politics for decades in the US—and elsewhere. The stakes have never been higher for citizens. Yet bickering and apathy avert the attention from the real issues, such as who's in control and what are their motivations? Obama is neither a saint nor a sinner in this passion play, he's been a facilitator of big interests while placating and somewhat shielding the citizens the full force of it. He's a better choice than all the rest by far, but he's also a part of the dis-ease, the widening divide between the 'haves' and the 'have nots', and even as GWB famously quipped, between the 'haves' and the have mores'. It's been (economic) civil war for quite some time now.
ReplyDeleteA very thoughtful post and I share your malaise, Rocky. However, I wonder are we really so much more separate than we have ever been before or is it just that modern means of communications allow us to run into the walls that divide us more easily? Before there was an Internet, misinformation had to be transmitted by much slower means and with a lot less authority. If the neighbor down the street shared some tidbit that he or she had received from someone around the corner,by the time the news had traveled through the entire neighborhood, someone had already started a another version that disputed the first and there were always the skeptics who considered the source. "Mrs. Smith, the crazy cat lady says etc...but I don't know if it's true."
ReplyDeleteNow, if it's on the Internet, received via email, then there are those who have no doubt of the veracity of the story and do indeed resent anyone who trues to tell them otherwise.
Maybe the gulf has always been this wide, only now we are well aware of it. Of course, it still sucks and this country is still broken.
Dino - can you imagine a judge doing something like that 20 years ago?
ReplyDeleteEdge - I particularly like your final observation, economic civil war. It does feel like a civil war and now we're just waiting for the bloodshed.
Sheria - I think you are correct in that "news" travels too fast and is too easily replicated so the old stop gaps no longer apply but I also see something else missing from our society and that is a sense of shame.
People say hurtful things about children and women and gays and minorities and they have no sense of the wrongness of it.
Rush makes those vile comments about a young college student and yes, sometimes people say stupid things in the heat of the moment but he not apologize for speaking so crudely and harshly even though he must know how wrong he is. No shame.