Politicin'

The muse has had really bad timing lately.  She gently flicks my ear to get my attention while I'm at work, she whispers ideas to me while I'm still half asleep in the shower, or sometimes when I'm driving home she tries to forcibly get ideas in my head....  But when I finally sit down to write, she's nowhere to be found.  She makes herself scarce and I'm left grasping at the ghosts of the ideas she planted in my head, the apparitions of thoughts that I can barely make out let alone put into words.

But, I'm here now so...

If you're a regular reader you already know my political beliefs fall right of center.  I've been following  the Occupy Wall Street/Chicago/etc. protests on the news with some level of amusement.  I know that the press is doing to them what they were doing to the Tea Party... finding the most asinine and outspoken idiots to use as a representative sample when it's anything but.

The truth is-- and I feel like a broken record here, the further on the fringe people are the more vocal they are.  The more vocal they are the more attention gets paid to them.  That does not mean they speak for the majority, it does not mean that they have the majority opinion... It just means they're the most vocal at expressing their thoughts and ideas.  

We human beans love a good circus and we tend to gravitate towards the freaks when we go to the circus, our media plays into that and contributes heavily to it.  The partisan rancor that exists in this country is largely the end product of the media... every story-- even in the news apparently there needs to be a good guy and a bad guy...  But reality is really just shades of grey, isn't it?

I still maintain that there are far more of us "in the middle" than on the fringes.  Most of us have opinions that are more similar than different.  Each of us has our own little leanings a little to the right here, a little to the left there...  but we all put our pants on one leg at a time, we breathe the same air, we live under the same sun and moon as everyone else... and maybe just maybe the rancor we have for "the opposition" is misguided.

In politics it's all about divide and conquer... and again the media plays into this.  Our politicians are like magicians.. they use deflection to distract us... and to "deflect" they get us to fight amongst ourselves.  And when we stop fighting amongst ourselves from time to time we realize they've made our taxpayer dollars disappear...  And it's not like pulling a rabbit out of a hat... It's not a matter of our money was there a second ago and suddenly highways or mass transit rail appear where the money once was...  the money is GONE... disappeared.  However sometimes when the money disappears, in its place you can clearly see tons and tons of red tape.