Crazy people

I find myself caught in a bit of a quandary; hoist - as it were - with my own petard. For you see I regard the rabid verbiage tossed around by the right wing as characteristic of a society being rent apart by its extremist elements. But on the other hand I am no slouch at tossing around some extreme verbiage of my own, particularly when it comes to describing my thoughts on that same right wing. "Bat-shit" crazy is a pretty common reference, as are "economic terrorists", "American Taliban", and "gun nuts". Not exactly words with which to build bridges.

There are some bridges that simply can't be built. There doesn't appear to be any way to bridge the gap between Young Earth Creationists and rational thought; which would seem to make the Y.E.Cs crazy by definition. But old earth creationists, if that's a good description, need not fall into camp crazy. They accept the cosmos as it appears to be, all 13.7 billion years of it. Then they weave a Creator into the mix, sort of after the fact. By all accounts there are some O.E.Cs who also reject the idea that god loves guns more than children, or that he hates the poor. Except for the belief in a creator, an O.E.C. and I could have a lot of common.

There could be a rather substantial bridge between ardent conservationists and hunting enthusiasts. The conservationist may not be a big fan of guns, but hunters are notable conservationists. In fact, given that we don't much want mountain lions and wolf packs roaming near where people live and raise kids, hunters are about the only predators around to keep the deer population (as one example) in check. Hard core conservationists and equally hard core hunters should be allies in many a political battle.

Everyone who grinds out 40, 50 or 60 hour weeks to just get by while worrying about affordable health care and a quality education for their kids would seem natural collaborators in the political fights with corporations and Wall Street. The person pounding rivets next to me on the assembly line may be a Y.E.C. while I an atheist, and we would still have more in common than either of us would have with the person sitting in the C.E.O's chair. We would both suffer the same repetitive motion injuries, both face lay offs and a need for unemployment insurance during the lean times, maybe lose the same friend to an unsafe environment in the plant, breathe the same metal dust, endure the same heat in the summer, work on the same frigid floor in the winter. About the only real difference in our lives would be that he spent his Wednesday nights at Bible study and Sunday mornings at church, while I spent Wednesday nights bowling and Sunday mornings fishing.

Why is there even an argument against regulating Wall Street so they can't tank the economy once again? Why do corporations get a free pass on busting unions, and why would any working person see that as a good thing? One would think that anything resembling a "Labor Party" in the US would reign supreme, yet there is no such an animal anywhere in sight. American working people shuddering at the very thought of a Labor party. Still, it would seem there should be very wide and heavily traveled bridges built between every group of laborers in the land. Instead the rift between left and right goes right down the middle of the people who actually do the work of building and maintaining a nation.

There is something more insidious going on. The fact is a divided people are a controllable people, and virtually all of our institutions are designed to keep us divided. A two party political system seems kind of an obvious ploy in this case, but it has been the way in the USA for so long that we all just look at it as normal. But really, could there be anything more divisive than a political structure that only allows two points of view? We are told the answer is either "X" or "Y", but no mention of Z, A, B, or ... We just had an election where virtually nothing changed. The government is still completely hamstrung by a small knot of lunatics (sorry, no other word fits) in the House and a Senate paralyzed by the very idea of leading. (Thus the enduring stalemates engineered by the filibuster - a bad idea that the Democrats couldn't find the courage to change even when they had the chance.)  Yet when I look close at the parties and their policies, there often isn't much difference.  Mostly they seem to rule by keeping a constant state of crisis going.  The terrorists are coming, the economy is failing, the debt is out of control, the army is too small, the army is too big, China is communist and our enemy, China is turning to capitalism and is our competitor, the Arabs are ... well, we don't really know what the Arabs are, but we are sure it is bad for us.

I'm not sure why it works, but a constant state of panic results in the American public voting the same people who cause the panic back into power, over and over again.

The media is a complete farce and have a deep financial stake in keeping the panic going. Take any issue, any statement, any speech, any political activity at all and one doesn't even have to turn it on to know the spin FOX news, MSNBC, and CNN are going to offer. Their "reporting" is so cast in stone that no matter what the issue the response is predetermined. Obama is never going to say a single thing that FOX can not turn into an impending Armageddon. Every single thing that any Republican states has MSNBC beating the political war drums. CNN ... they are the ones on the yellow stripe right in the middle. Newspapers and magazines are the same, as are most blogs. (I know, I know!) But it is the kind of "reporting" that keeps the sponsors happy and their respective audiences feeling like they are special, better than the audience of that other station. It is gospel on the left that FOX viewers are the worst informed people on the planet, gospel on the right that MSNBC and CNN are bastions of "liberalism" and misinformation. All work at nothing but widening the divides to keep the money flowing.

Religion is perhaps the worst of the bunch. Looking around the world right now and it is hard to imagine anything doing more collective harm than the RCC, Jihadists, and the Protestant Right Wing. Child abuse, the growing oppression of women, violence of the most appalling kind, a growing hatred of anything that smacks of rationality and education ... it is hard to imagine how it could get any worse, though every day it seems to do just that. Yet the vast majority of the people in both the US and the world take up the banner of one religion or another, and it shows. The religions are playing the same game for the same reason, to hold power and keep the panic going.

It seems so glaringly obvious that we are all being played for fools. Yet somehow it isn't obvious, and somehow we can't seem to do anything about it. It isn't an analogy that the crazy people are running the asylum, it is simply a description of the world we live in. And I have to wonder who is more crazy? The nut cases running the asylum, or the supposedly sane people who keep electing them?