Soap Box

The political mindset in this nation - and I am including myself in the mix - has deteriorated to the point that our minds are made up - to a big extent - by who it is that is proposing certain ideas, our disdain and intransigence triggered by mere words like Republican, Democrat, conservative or liberal, being of the opinion that the people these terms represent are either doing something acceptable to us or something underhanded, depending on which side we tend to line up with.

We have gotten to the point that, many times, we don’t even examine what’s being proposed, acting as if the identity of the person or party proposing it is enough to make up our minds about validity and ramifications.

To tell the truth, we have become so polarized in our political psyche that we think the people on the other side of the spectrum are untrustworthy and incapable of good ideas, beneficial legislation or meaningful policy and dismiss anything they come up with, out of hand just because of who it’s associated with.

A large part of this distrust has been fostered by the politicians themselves and their proclivity for acting as if they wore all the white hats and the guys on the other side of the aisle all wear black ones and are out to ruin the country.

They spend a lot more time criticizing and belittling the opposition than they do trying to solve the problems of the nation, and those chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the lowest trust rating US politicians have ever experienced.

The media is also complicit in fanning the flames and over the years have become much more partisan and much less reliable in telling the whole truth, or maybe even omitting or downplaying it when it suits their purposes, and sometimes resort to unsourced or poorly sourced reporting.

I was reading a hit piece this morning that actually said that the major parties involved had denied that the incident in question ever happened, but I doubt many readers ever got that far in reading the piece and the lead and the first few lines were extremely inflammatory, while the body of the piece contained what amounted to tacit disclaimers.

In other words, the crux of the matter was “Somebody whose credibility we can’t vouch for has told us something that will make a great headline and although we can’t prove its true and it is likely to besmirch some reputations, we’re going to print it anyway”.

It seems that we have regressed to an "us and them" posture and the roots of our malady can be traced back to the very same origins that gave birth to racism, elitism and the blind disdain for anything that doesn’t fit our mold and we resort to a take no prisoners, kill the messenger attitudes, intransigence and even prejudice fueled hate.

And so, we go around in our circles, picking through the news for “I told you so” and “gotcha”

articles, taking great joy when the other side gets blindsided and crying foul when our side takes the brunt of the criticism.

And to exacerbate the conundrum, it’s getting increasingly hard to decimate the fake from the real news and sometimes, in their haste to be the one to break a story, the media outlets rush to judgement and report less than pertinent facts sometimes encouraging and sometimes enraging one faction or another, and once Pandora opens the box, well you know the rest.

How do we get ourselves out of this predicament and get back to civil discourse, put aside the character assassination and preconceived animosity and judge by merit rather than partisanship?

I really don’t know, but I think a good place to start would be to think for ourselves, to read between the lines, to stop always picking the low hanging fruit and reach a little higher for our information, to cull out the sensationalists and watch the results rather than the partisan predictions.

I keep wondering how much further apart we can drift before the rhetoric becomes so hot and the rift becomes so wide that there’s no turning back without violence and anarchy.

And I’m afraid that day is not as far away as we may think.

God help us if it ever arrives.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops. our police and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

— Charlie Daniels

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