I do not understand politics. I had to admit that recently to a room full of government watchdog blogger types. I suppose there was a purple horn sprouting from my forehead, too.
But it’s true. I told them that I found politics to be a “painful exercise in idiocy.” I’ve tried to absorb politics into my intellect with the daily headline updates, by diving deeper with the aide of alternative political magazines, tuning in to the pundit shows on TV and AM radio, sitting in on lectures, scanning blogs and listening in on the coffee shop diatribes.
Nothing.
It always sounds like the wah-wah-wah gibberish of Charlie Brown’s teacher to me. How can the various camps of otherwise-intelligent leaders actually argue over the importance of providing quality education to every American child? Whether or not our nation’s priority should be to preserve and sustain a fading middle America or to protect the unprecedented wealth of our country’s smallest population? Should there really be extended conversation over the “immigrants” whose taxes we collect through creatively-coded provisions every year, even though their citizen papers seem permanently jammed in the government machine?
And please tell me the forensics champion who crafted the argument for spending billions of dollars on space exploration while 12 million U.S. children are going hunger every year?
Government officials are supposed to protect our children, and our neighborhoods, and our schools, and our jobs, and our seniors, and our forests, and our soldiers, and our legacy of artists and entrepreneurs, and our way of life.
It’s a lot, I know. I don’t let my idealism overwhelm the black-and-white pictures scattered in front of me. This is gargantuan mess to tidy up.
But it would seem, at least, that we could move closer and faster toward real-life solutions if our politics had not become so diseased with ego and greed.
And I haven’t dismissed the notion that “ego” and “greed” are simply unavoidable synonyms for “politics.” But I do still get woozy and a little nauseous when I’m reminded how powerless we are to keep the beast from devouring what little bit of freedom, peace and comfort we have left.
Weapons of Mass Destruction hidden with a nation that still wages is war using chunks of rubble? A war on drugs waged against disenfranchised poor people whose only access to the aforementioned drugs are through the government (poor folks can’t afford jet planes, people)?
No Child Left Behind incantations leaving emaciated schools and hardened, spiritless educators? An aggressive campaign to protect the institution of marriage being led by adulterous politicians, lecherous talking heads and religious leaders who flagrantly engage questionable fetishes of their own? Remember the movie Dave, where Kevin Kline plays a fill-in president and uses –what was that called .. ? Oh yeah, COMMON SENSE to guide the cabinet toward a balanced budget?
I should not be able to gleam more hope from a movie set than the Oval office.
So I stopped paying attention to politics during the Reagan administration. For me, the Gipper and his country club cronies marked the mutation of a new brand of arrogance and entitlement. It became painful to watch them violate the unwealthy on a daily basis. To this day, for all the posturing and hollow bantering and subsequent NOTHING that takes place, political chatter might as well include legislature for rounding up the Hobbits and battling for Middle Earth. All nonsense.
Why waste my time, tears and brain cells on undebates that -- clearly -- are not being waged with actual progress in mind. We’re either in this to move forward or we’re in this … to just … move … around. So far, I haven’t been convinced that “forward” is on the agenda of any politicians any more.
