The race for the White House has already begun again even though the election isn't until November 2012. And soon it will be flooding the airwaves and newspapers with oft-repeated, tired refrains and money.
Believe me, there are quite a few smaller market television stations that are gleefully awaiting that money because campaigns rupture cash into markets across the country.
I get the image in my mind of a greedy little gnome anxiously, or perhaps hungrily, rubbing his hands together and cackling in anticipation...
But you know what? It doesn't matter who's in office, which party that person represents, what color they are, what orientation, gender, etc...
There will always be people screaming, hollering out that who ever's in power is to blame for absolutely everything that's wrong in the world, in society, in culture and so forth today. Seems it's always the same people who are screaming, or at least the same rants being expressed.
However, everything is built on top of something else, much like how ancient cities have been found beneath modern ones in countries like Italy. It's a progression. No one thing is completely separate from everything else and everything that came before.
If the problems are coming to a head now, then they began to build sometime in the past, most likely before the last election. Probably even earlier than that.
On top of that, problems that are beginning to grow now will come to a head sometime in the future... Possibly after the next presidential election or even later.
But like the political cartoon in 2008 that showed Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all wearing bulging diapers and shouting, "Change!" or like Robin Williams' character in "Man of the Year," Tom Dobbs, who jokes, "Politicians are a lot like diapers. They should be changed frequently, and for the same reason." (quoting Benjamin Franklin), there will always be a call for something different.
The old saying, "The grass is always greener..."
Well, guess what? It's not. It's the same stuff, just in a different spot, or a different rhetoric. And the same goes for pretty much all politicians as far as I have seen.
They boast and prance, pose and declare, but when it comes down to it, no matter what promises they made while campaigning, they will have to work with what ever currently exists. So a bad budget will continue to be a bad budget no matter who's trying to balance it.
People are going to respond to what's happening. Some of the commentary I have seen is outright hate-filled, outrageous and even completely ignorant.
Take, for example, the people who rant against one person now, and who will also rant against that person's successor in the future, saying almost the exact same things. Such is the case I have often seen when people get into political arguments.
"We're better, they're not." "We'll do what needs to be done and they won't." Us and them, two sides ever divided, no matter how alike they really are.
Good song for this - "Both Sides of the Coin" from "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" by Charles Dickens. Part of the duet:
"For is it I or is it me?
"And if I'm him and if I'm he/each on of us might not/Agree on what to do.
"And if I take opposing sides within myself,/Then who divides up what is right or wrong?
"I'll go along with you.
"Ha'penny, one penny, tupenny, thrupenny/Twelve to a shilling, twice that to a florin/To find the same face on both sides of the coin?/Bob is your uncle from pennies to guineas,/The two-sided mint is the rule, not exception,/And would you not quite feel quite the fool of deception/To find the same face on both sides of the coin?"
To hear the song - click here.
If you don't recognize the currency, those are old English coins. Nor am I either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern who find a coin on the side of the road that keeps coming up heads.
Politicians and their supporters sling mud back and forth, trying to dirty the other side, no matter which side of that proverbial coin happens to be facing up. But guess what? The person throwing the mud will still be spattered by the spray and will have a filthy hand in the meantime.
Even though I am not a Christian, did not Jesus say that he who is without sin can be the first to throw a stone? According to the Bible, since all people are born "tainted" with the so-called Original Sin of Eve, even if it is supposedly absolved by baptism, doesn't that indicate there is no one who is without sin?
Thus we end up with hate-filled ads on television or in the newspaper. For what else was the whole rigamarole with the Swiftboat Veterans or any of the other similar ads that come out with every single election for just about every single race, large and small?
They will attack. Sometimes they go after a specific thing a person has done, like how John Kerry supposedly kept harping on his Purple Hearts. Sometimes they go after an issue, such as current President Barack Obama's vote on the debt ceiling while holding a seat in the Senate.
Among the people screaming the loudest are those who protest what has already happened.
In this particular instance, I'm talking about an issue that was abolished more than 100 years ago: slavery and the Civil War (which actually began over state rights, not slavery). And all the angst that continues to broil to this day.
We're currently "celebrating" 150 years since the beginning of that war, an event most people agree occurred on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. I have seen a reference to an earlier skirmish that took place in Florida in January 1861, but I haven't seen that much information on it, so I'm going to go with the April origin.
To this day, certain groups continue to wave the slavery flag, saying the descendents of the slaves are owed something. To be blunt, when was the last time they picked cotton or lived in a commune with no shoes, running water, dirt floors, etc. or were sold as chattel? It's in the past, so leave it there.
Of course, most people forget who the original slaves were: the American Indian tribes. Unfortunately, vast numbers of those people were wiped out by diseases brought over from Europe like small pox, typhus, measles, various sexually transmitted nasties, among others. Doesn't do the land owner any good to have a work force that drops dead, now does it?
So the land owners turned to another source of labor: the various African tribes that were constantly fighting amongst themselves in a region where enslaving the losers was traditional. So here we are with certain people still screaming over what was done in the past.
However! Those same groups keep throwing fits over references to that past. For instance, reprinting Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to remove all references to the "hated" n-word. Can't be that hated since it's used all the time in a certain style of music that began with the very culture that claims to hate it...
Of course, the people screaming over this one are forgetting one very simple fact: This book was written for its time period. That WAS a time when people of darker skin were sold as chattel with no name but their use (thus all the Smiths and Bakers and other such common surnames) or the name of their owner. So read it for its historical and cultural reference, but changing it now is a moot point!
Or in another example, the teacher trying to help students understand what a human auction was like by holding a mock one in her class (this happened in Virginia, a state that was a part of the Confederacy and where slavery was a common practice, including by such notable figures as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington). I will admit, this may not have been in the best of taste, but because slavery is a part of our history, we can't forget it.
We are not Stalinists who would rewrite the history of our country to make of it what we would wish and to eliminate that which is distasteful, unfortunate and uncomfortable.
I have been mocked for "going off" on certain topics and this is one of them. I am not Aunt Polly and I don't need my fence whitewashed. (That's a literary reference in case you would like to look it up.)
Teach me the history as it was, in as unvarnished a way as possible. (And in as objective a way as possible since all history books are written by the victors, which automatically means such texts are already biased.) What is important, what is significant behind the dates our children try to memorize in school?
Why? There's another saying that's very fitting here - Those who do not learn history (or forget it or ignore it) are doomed to repeat it.
Whitewashing the unpleasantness, covering it up, doesn't eliminate the fact that it existed.
My view - Ignorance breeds fear. Fear breeds prejudice. Prejudice breeds hate. Hate breeds destruction. And that in turn breeds deeper ignorance.
Political Screaming... AKA Whining and Fear Mongering - Part 2 - Playing on Fear
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