The Great Divide

Greetings good citizen,

It’s been one for the books already and today isn’t nearly over but that’s on the personal side of the ledger and I won’t bother you with the details.

Let it suffice to say that you’ve got enough on your plate already without my adding to it.

Besides, like most ‘personal problems’, there isn’t anything you can do about it anyway.

I’m supposed to be hosting a birthday party for my teenaged son but instead I’m down here, penning this post.

Probably says something about my ‘parenting skills’, doesn’t it.

But life is full of conflict. The trick is to know where the common ground lies.

We cannot reverse corrupt policies that benefit only a powerful few because our society is fragmented into rival competing groups of us and them. Too many of us care more about the beliefs and agendas of our particular group than the common threats to all groups. To be sure, we are likely to say (and probably even believe) that our primary loyalty is to humanity; that our group is not exclusive; that WE are trying to make the world better for everybody dammit but we cannot because of THEM. But the truth is, when we actually confront the difficult task of finding common ground between us and them, we tend to throw in the towel rather quickly. Sometimes it just seems easier to fight “them” than try to break through our differences in order to build a more democratic and humane political system for everybody. Perhaps some of us even fear that if we sit down at the table to make peace with “them,” the very reason for our group’s existence will dissolve and we would no longer know who we are.

That a mere 400 individuals in this constitutional republic could possess as much wealth as 150,000,000 fellow citizens, and that the government would protect their right to keep it, would be unimaginable in any other context. Our fragmentation is an almost insurmountable barrier to effective political action that would move us toward a significantly more democratic reality. There are so many different contending groups—so many different varieties of us and them—that forging a cohesive majority seems all but a hopeless pipe dream.

Although we live in an irreducibly pluralistic world, we have yet to learn how to function as a pluralistic democracy. Sadly, even those of us who belong to groups that are pledged to tolerance and inclusiveness can drop the ball as readily as those who are self-consciously exclusive. Many commentators of various ideological stripes have lately been sounding the alarm about the apparent erosion of civil discourse in our society, about the toxic negativity of our media and our elections. The level of social polarization -- and the shrillness of our rhetorical warfare -- seems to be escalating. We all feel it. Many of us worry about it. Most of us say that we want it to stop. But too often we ourselves contribute to it--including me.

I think few would disagree with the findings of this article.

Part of the reason we find ourselves sitting in this pile of shit has to do with the largely imaginary rifts opened up by the political rhetoric slingers.

Naturally, the bastards claim they have been ‘taken out of context’ when they are called on their derisive rhetoric but you know damn well they ‘mean what they say and say what they mean and it usually is precisely that, ‘mean’.

Beyond weird is how the > One Percent can convince the rest of us that the majority of us wanna be just like them!

Which is true…to a degree. We all dream of the day when we will no longer need to sweat our obligations but that is a day the will only come if we are both extremely frugal AND extremely LUCKY!

Everybody (with varying degrees of success, which is to say ‘failure’) ‘tries’ to set aside something for a rainy day…but the fucking rain refuses to stop!

(Yet another disturbing ‘commonality’, the ‘average’ schmoe is on a steady ‘bad luck’ diet.)

So, why are we so divided?

Because the corporate owned media tells us we are!

We (sadly) ‘believe’ that most of us are closeted conservatives when only one out of every five actually VOTES Republican.

So how do they keep winning elections?

YOU can’t verify who REALLY WON. YOU are ‘at the mercy and the (ahem) honesty' of the corporate owned media!

EVEN IF 80% of us are convinced they are full of shit, there’s still NO WAY to prove it!

And they aren’t about to produce the actual ballots so YOU can see just how everyone voted.

They don’t have to…and if they did there is no way to tell if a majority of the ballots weren’t forged! (The work of a few minutes in our modern age.)
Thus do we need a different, more positive method for determining the will of the people. The ‘secret ballot’ isn’t it!

If we are to have an ‘accountable’ government we need to have ‘transparency and tracability!

Only the scoundrel needs secrecy!

So the REAL question here is how long are we going to let them get away with lying to our faces?

When will we call their bluff and make them prove we are as divided as they claim we are?

>One Percent of us running the other 99% over the edge of a cliff just isn’t how it’s supposed to go down.

Which is to ask just how much BULLSHIT are you willing to swallow?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner