I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass.
Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized.
Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest.
Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted.
I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605.
And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking.
There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via chemical trails from planes and by the fluoridation of the water supply.
Oddly, there are sites complaining how rogue billionaires are funding the violent protests ongoing throughout the nation. There are sites claiming the group, Black Lives Matter, are wreaking havoc and committing violence in major cities. I think this should call into question the efficacy of those chemical trails and fluoridation plots!
There are sites devoted to discovering those responsible for political assassinations, international banking, how the towers really came down, and the number of murders attributed to certain political figures.
The responsible parties, according to these sites, could be the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Bankers, the Masons, the Rothschilds, and everyone’s favorite, the Jews.
In this topsy-turvy state of affairs, Blacks are now the racists, Jews are anti-semites, and Hispanics are rapists. Immigrants are stealing our jobs, though I’ve not seen a white person working the fields. Muslims are terrorists and women have no rights except the right to be groped.
And of course, the greatest existential threat to the fabric of American society is the LGBT community and their gay agenda. The politician with two divorces, facing fraud and rape charges, and who is backed by fundamentalist Christians, is apoplectic about the gays.
The list of ills the country is facing, according to these sites, is exhaustive; the motives are often contradictory and quite often nonsensical and referred to by that catch all phrase, the New World Order.
Fact checking has become a fulltime job rather than an exercise in due diligence. We now fact check the fact checkers and for those of us working class stiffs simply trying to ferret out what the hell politicians are doing in our name, it is becoming impossible to get the facts.
But that is of no importance, for no one agrees with whatever facts you may care to cite.
And in not being able to discern which nefarious secret organization is the actual shadow government in charge, you are labeled as “sheeple.” You are called lazy, told you are asleep and need to wake up. You are stupid.
Now, granted, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I am not stupid and I am not asleep.
I have my own ideas on the role of government, how society should function, and my role in it. I am idealistic, but I am also realistic enough to know politics is the art of compromise.
Nuance, is that shade of meaning which makes the world function; you see, I don’t hold with the concept of absolutism. Dogma and doctrine, in my worldview, are antithetical to critical thinking.
But I am no political science major. I am no historian. Hell, I barely made it out of high school and I flunked out of community college. Blue collar working class and fucking proud of it, that’s me!
Well, not proud, not really, I wish I had worked harder to earn a college degree. But that’s fodder for another time when we discuss inferiority complexes.
The point is the majority of folks who have to do the living, the dying, the working, and the suffering, in this society are folks just like me. There are millions of us, sixty per cent of the population at least, who are without a college degree.
We don’t have time to fact check every byte of data, to suss out every piece of information in the news, or to run down every fake news site on the Internet. We try, but we are too damn busy earning a living, looking after family, and worrying about what will happen when we retire, something that scares the shit out of me. The question of will we be a burden to our children is a serious one. Gone is the noble idea that we will be able to help them.
We are engaged enough to look into the issues as best we can. And yes, sometimes we fall short, but don’t blame us; we are up against professionals, folks who make their living writing, researching, deceiving, and manipulating.
Me, and folks like me, are doing our level best to discern fact from fiction.
So, the subtleties of economic policy, the use of the IMF and military force to ensure our financial goals are met, foreign policy decisions of which people to bomb (currently we are bombing 7 different countries, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan), who to render into the bowels of Guantanamo Bay, who to assassinate with an anonymous drone strike, these are some of the things we would probably not approve. But we don’t have all the particulars because the news is not reliably informing us about these issues.
The one thing most of us agree on is that bombing other people’s children probably does little to convince their parents of the righteousness of our cause.
This brings me to the recent American election of 2016.
Could there have been two worse choices for leader of this country?
We elected the first African American president, not once but twice, 2008 and 2012, two terms of office with a clear majority winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
President Obama inherited a mess, a worldwide recession of a magnitude not seen since the crash of the twenties, two unpaid for wars, and rampant unemployment.
He eventually lost the Congress and the Senate. The Republicans vowed to keep him to one term; they failed. So, they obstructed everything he proposed. And that was unprecedented.
Still, he managed to create the biggest job growth since the nineties, the auto industry had breaking sales records, unemployment was cut in half, the deficit was cut by three quarters and the stock market tripled.
Controversial though it was, the Affordable Care Act was the most significant overhaul of the United States healthcare system since 1965.
Now we have elected a Washington outsider in Donald Trump.
While President Obama enjoys a 55% approval rating, and the Congress had only 9% approval in 2013 going to about 12% recently, the Democrats nevertheless lost the presidency, both houses and the Supreme Court.
False charges, fake news sites, the conspiracy theories of the Alt-Right combined with the inability of the Clinton machine to connect with the people, or convince folks of their platform, to present HRC as a charismatic, trustworthy leader, all gave rise to President Elect Trump.
Nearly half of Americans, 43.1%, did not vote. They were not swayed or inspired by either candidate. That is hardly an endorsement for the leadership of the nation. It is instead a huge number of pissed off citizens.
HRC lost the presidency, the Senate, Congress, 31 state governorships, and the Supreme Court, a monumental failure for the DNC. And it was a failure that might have been avoided had their arrogance and avarice not prevented them from backing a candidate, namely Bernie Sanders, whom the polls indicated could have beaten Donald Trump.
It must be mentioned that FBI director, James Comey, didn’t help with his editorializing surrounding the decision not to charge Clinton for using a personal email server.
And Julian Assange, the people’s champion of transparency, with help from the Russians, according to seven national intelligence agencies, published thousands of pages of hacked email from the DNC.
The vast majority of the emails were mundane but while there was no smoking gun, there was enough doubt cast about the trustworthiness of the DNC and Clinton to conclude they actively thwarted Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic nomination.
There were rumours of Russian collaboration with the Trump team. No investigation ensued however, not by the FBI or by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, so much for transparency.
Sergei A. Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, says his government was indeed in contact with the Trump campaign.
And yet, there is still no official investigation regarding a foreign government’s involvement in an American election.
The news from Assange does not comment on this incredible revelation. Apparently, the suspicion that a foreign power might have influenced the election of the United States of America thereby throwing uncertainty into the geopolitical arena does not rise to the same degree of interest as hacked emails describing what to have for lunch.
Instead, the news form Assange was all about his statement, given from his sanctuary at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been essentially under house arrest for 6 years, to Swedish prosecutors on the matter of rape accusations made by women Assange knew.
Americans are now stuck with President Elect Trump, himself facing rape charges from a then, 13-year-old girl. But the charges were dropped. The complainant apparently received so many death threats from Trump supporters she withdrew the charge. Incidentally, Mindy McGillivary, one of the many women who publicly stated that the actions President Trump admitted to doing in the infamous video tape with Billy Bush, was done to her by Mr. Trump, says she's leaving the country because of death threats. President Elect Trump, the darling of evangelical Christians like Jerry Falwell Jr.
In another of his many legal cases pending, he offered a 25 million dollar settlement on the charge he defrauded 6,000 people who spent thousands of dollars for his fake university, the judge still has yet to accept his offer to settle.
The Trump transition team is said to be facing difficulties, and his appointments thus far have been controversial. They include Steve Bannon from Breitbart, an online platform for the so-called Alt-Right, as Whitehouse advisor.
The fear on the street is that right wing racists, white nationalists, and neo-fascists might now have sway in the Trump administration. The KKK endorsed Mr. Trump.
David Duke, former Imperial Grand Dragon or whatever the fuck these cowards in bed sheets, these American terrorists, call themselves, was ecstatic. They plan to have a parade for President Elect Trump. That’s right. If you voted for Mr. Trump, you voted the same as the KKK. But you are no racist, right?
Vice President Elect Mike Pence is anti-gay and equalities hard won by the LGBT community are now at risk as are issues of women’s health specifically in the case of Roe v Wade.
President Elect Trump is a climate denier who claims that climate change is a hoax started by the Chinese to destabilize America. He has surrounded himself with people of like minds and will be placing them in positions of authority. The atmosphere surrounding President Elect Trump’s advisors is clearly anti-intellectual, anti-science and contains an element of hyper religiosity. Sound familiar?
However Donald Trump got into the Whitehouse, the issue now is will America, as we know it, survive? Will our society morph into some caricature of nineteen-thirties Germany?
We are peering into the abyss. I hope we do not lose our footing.
Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized.
Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest.
Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted.
I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605.
And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking.
There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via chemical trails from planes and by the fluoridation of the water supply.
Oddly, there are sites complaining how rogue billionaires are funding the violent protests ongoing throughout the nation. There are sites claiming the group, Black Lives Matter, are wreaking havoc and committing violence in major cities. I think this should call into question the efficacy of those chemical trails and fluoridation plots!
There are sites devoted to discovering those responsible for political assassinations, international banking, how the towers really came down, and the number of murders attributed to certain political figures.
The responsible parties, according to these sites, could be the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Bankers, the Masons, the Rothschilds, and everyone’s favorite, the Jews.
In this topsy-turvy state of affairs, Blacks are now the racists, Jews are anti-semites, and Hispanics are rapists. Immigrants are stealing our jobs, though I’ve not seen a white person working the fields. Muslims are terrorists and women have no rights except the right to be groped.
And of course, the greatest existential threat to the fabric of American society is the LGBT community and their gay agenda. The politician with two divorces, facing fraud and rape charges, and who is backed by fundamentalist Christians, is apoplectic about the gays.
The list of ills the country is facing, according to these sites, is exhaustive; the motives are often contradictory and quite often nonsensical and referred to by that catch all phrase, the New World Order.
Fact checking has become a fulltime job rather than an exercise in due diligence. We now fact check the fact checkers and for those of us working class stiffs simply trying to ferret out what the hell politicians are doing in our name, it is becoming impossible to get the facts.
But that is of no importance, for no one agrees with whatever facts you may care to cite.
And in not being able to discern which nefarious secret organization is the actual shadow government in charge, you are labeled as “sheeple.” You are called lazy, told you are asleep and need to wake up. You are stupid.
Now, granted, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I am not stupid and I am not asleep.
I have my own ideas on the role of government, how society should function, and my role in it. I am idealistic, but I am also realistic enough to know politics is the art of compromise.
Nuance, is that shade of meaning which makes the world function; you see, I don’t hold with the concept of absolutism. Dogma and doctrine, in my worldview, are antithetical to critical thinking.
But I am no political science major. I am no historian. Hell, I barely made it out of high school and I flunked out of community college. Blue collar working class and fucking proud of it, that’s me!
Well, not proud, not really, I wish I had worked harder to earn a college degree. But that’s fodder for another time when we discuss inferiority complexes.
The point is the majority of folks who have to do the living, the dying, the working, and the suffering, in this society are folks just like me. There are millions of us, sixty per cent of the population at least, who are without a college degree.
We don’t have time to fact check every byte of data, to suss out every piece of information in the news, or to run down every fake news site on the Internet. We try, but we are too damn busy earning a living, looking after family, and worrying about what will happen when we retire, something that scares the shit out of me. The question of will we be a burden to our children is a serious one. Gone is the noble idea that we will be able to help them.
We are engaged enough to look into the issues as best we can. And yes, sometimes we fall short, but don’t blame us; we are up against professionals, folks who make their living writing, researching, deceiving, and manipulating.
Me, and folks like me, are doing our level best to discern fact from fiction.
So, the subtleties of economic policy, the use of the IMF and military force to ensure our financial goals are met, foreign policy decisions of which people to bomb (currently we are bombing 7 different countries, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan), who to render into the bowels of Guantanamo Bay, who to assassinate with an anonymous drone strike, these are some of the things we would probably not approve. But we don’t have all the particulars because the news is not reliably informing us about these issues.
The one thing most of us agree on is that bombing other people’s children probably does little to convince their parents of the righteousness of our cause.
This brings me to the recent American election of 2016.
Could there have been two worse choices for leader of this country?
We elected the first African American president, not once but twice, 2008 and 2012, two terms of office with a clear majority winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
President Obama inherited a mess, a worldwide recession of a magnitude not seen since the crash of the twenties, two unpaid for wars, and rampant unemployment.
He eventually lost the Congress and the Senate. The Republicans vowed to keep him to one term; they failed. So, they obstructed everything he proposed. And that was unprecedented.
Still, he managed to create the biggest job growth since the nineties, the auto industry had breaking sales records, unemployment was cut in half, the deficit was cut by three quarters and the stock market tripled.
Controversial though it was, the Affordable Care Act was the most significant overhaul of the United States healthcare system since 1965.
Now we have elected a Washington outsider in Donald Trump.
While President Obama enjoys a 55% approval rating, and the Congress had only 9% approval in 2013 going to about 12% recently, the Democrats nevertheless lost the presidency, both houses and the Supreme Court.
False charges, fake news sites, the conspiracy theories of the Alt-Right combined with the inability of the Clinton machine to connect with the people, or convince folks of their platform, to present HRC as a charismatic, trustworthy leader, all gave rise to President Elect Trump.
Nearly half of Americans, 43.1%, did not vote. They were not swayed or inspired by either candidate. That is hardly an endorsement for the leadership of the nation. It is instead a huge number of pissed off citizens.
HRC lost the presidency, the Senate, Congress, 31 state governorships, and the Supreme Court, a monumental failure for the DNC. And it was a failure that might have been avoided had their arrogance and avarice not prevented them from backing a candidate, namely Bernie Sanders, whom the polls indicated could have beaten Donald Trump.
It must be mentioned that FBI director, James Comey, didn’t help with his editorializing surrounding the decision not to charge Clinton for using a personal email server.
And Julian Assange, the people’s champion of transparency, with help from the Russians, according to seven national intelligence agencies, published thousands of pages of hacked email from the DNC.
The vast majority of the emails were mundane but while there was no smoking gun, there was enough doubt cast about the trustworthiness of the DNC and Clinton to conclude they actively thwarted Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic nomination.
There were rumours of Russian collaboration with the Trump team. No investigation ensued however, not by the FBI or by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, so much for transparency.
Sergei A. Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, says his government was indeed in contact with the Trump campaign.
And yet, there is still no official investigation regarding a foreign government’s involvement in an American election.
The news from Assange does not comment on this incredible revelation. Apparently, the suspicion that a foreign power might have influenced the election of the United States of America thereby throwing uncertainty into the geopolitical arena does not rise to the same degree of interest as hacked emails describing what to have for lunch.
Instead, the news form Assange was all about his statement, given from his sanctuary at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been essentially under house arrest for 6 years, to Swedish prosecutors on the matter of rape accusations made by women Assange knew.
Americans are now stuck with President Elect Trump, himself facing rape charges from a then, 13-year-old girl. But the charges were dropped. The complainant apparently received so many death threats from Trump supporters she withdrew the charge. Incidentally, Mindy McGillivary, one of the many women who publicly stated that the actions President Trump admitted to doing in the infamous video tape with Billy Bush, was done to her by Mr. Trump, says she's leaving the country because of death threats. President Elect Trump, the darling of evangelical Christians like Jerry Falwell Jr.
In another of his many legal cases pending, he offered a 25 million dollar settlement on the charge he defrauded 6,000 people who spent thousands of dollars for his fake university, the judge still has yet to accept his offer to settle.
The Trump transition team is said to be facing difficulties, and his appointments thus far have been controversial. They include Steve Bannon from Breitbart, an online platform for the so-called Alt-Right, as Whitehouse advisor.
The fear on the street is that right wing racists, white nationalists, and neo-fascists might now have sway in the Trump administration. The KKK endorsed Mr. Trump.
David Duke, former Imperial Grand Dragon or whatever the fuck these cowards in bed sheets, these American terrorists, call themselves, was ecstatic. They plan to have a parade for President Elect Trump. That’s right. If you voted for Mr. Trump, you voted the same as the KKK. But you are no racist, right?
Vice President Elect Mike Pence is anti-gay and equalities hard won by the LGBT community are now at risk as are issues of women’s health specifically in the case of Roe v Wade.
President Elect Trump is a climate denier who claims that climate change is a hoax started by the Chinese to destabilize America. He has surrounded himself with people of like minds and will be placing them in positions of authority. The atmosphere surrounding President Elect Trump’s advisors is clearly anti-intellectual, anti-science and contains an element of hyper religiosity. Sound familiar?
However Donald Trump got into the Whitehouse, the issue now is will America, as we know it, survive? Will our society morph into some caricature of nineteen-thirties Germany?
We are peering into the abyss. I hope we do not lose our footing.
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