This land's not your land...

Greetings good citizen,

I used to relish Sundays. Sunday was the day I could read my favorite editorials written by folks who held surprisingly similar worldviews to my own…

We all admire people who agree with us, it’s only natural.

So what can be said when you no longer see ‘eye to eye’ with your favorite commentators?

Even this is not a ‘fair’ indictment. I agree wholeheartedly with today’s piece , it’s just that I think he’s ‘wasting his breath’, ‘flogging a dead horse’ if you will.

This does not diminish my respect for this individual’s talent, it merely perturbs me that he is forced to (by his ‘terms of employment’), er, ‘pretend’ that our political system functions ‘as advertised’.

Ironically, this same issue was the topic of today’s ‘On the Media’ broadcast on NPR, how Hurricane Katrina ushered in the ‘sympatico’ talking head.

I tend to think the RWNM has more to do with this unseemly turn of events because they were the ones who began to openly demonize those who didn’t see things ‘their way’.

Seems to me ‘journalism’ lost its ‘objectivity’ shortly after the Reagan Revolution…pointing to Katrina is just more smoke to obscure an unsettling bit of piracy.

For once again we encounter stories like this which are told in a way that ‘masks’ the seriousness of the problem.

Sure the ‘individual narrative’ lets us ‘feel the victims pain’ but it hides the fact that this particular victim is NOT Alone! There are millions more out there and huge percentages can’t find help period.

The resources available were already operating at maximum capacity BEFORE the crisis. To say they are ‘overwhelmed’ now is to severely understate the problem!

Worse, the article itself seriously understates the scope of the crisis. We once again have the same variety of ‘inference’ at play when the media tells us that 40 million Americans are on ‘food assistance’…people get the impression the media is talking about individuals! 40 million is not individuals; it’s families/households!

There are 117 million households in the US (and nearly 15 million have been foreclosed upon…but I digress) so the number of people receiving foodstamps is much larger than 40 million!

Out of our population of 300 million, we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million. (Not everyone on food assistance is also unemployed/homeless.)

Which is a much larger number than the 40 million the media, er, admits to.

Not to put too fine a point on it good citizen but how much do you ‘love’ the land of the free and the home of the brave now?

And we owe it all (in more ways than one) to the ‘Stupid Capitalists’.

I know I sound like a broken record but sometimes you just can’t repeat your main point often enough.

We live in a ‘broken nation’ that we desperately need to fix.

An monumental task made that much more daunting by the fact that we don’t agree on what needs to be fixed…

Sadly, this is due largely to ‘perception management’ spewed by the fucktards who keep you focused on illegal immigrants and tax cuts for the already rich!

How fucked up is that good citizen?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner