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Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Can't We All Just Get Along?

I spent last weekend with some of my best friends in Las Vegas for a bachelor party. I’ve never had any desire to go there, and it’s pretty out of character for most of us to party like we did, but we had a good time, although I’m not sharing any details. My buddy who is getting married had testicular cancer last year and spent many months going through surgeries and treatments, and eventually came out of it fully recovered. So, we thought we’d do something of a once in a lifetime kind of way to honor all that he has gone through.
I’m completely exhausted. We slept for 3-4 hours a night at best and ended up spending the night on the floor in the Phoenix airport Sunday night due to a USAir screw up. They were kind enough to give us blankets that better resembled washcloths and tell us how sorry they were that they couldn’t care less about our troubles and wouldn’t stop to spit on us if we were dying in the street. I will never, ever, fly with them ever again.
Anyway, in my bleary eyed, exhausted state of mind, and separation from the outside world for a few days I’ve realized how low the political debate has gotten in this country. I was web surfing last night to see what had happened in the world in the last few days and came across some political blogs that resemble some of the recent ones on Humzoo. Not sure if anyone else noticed, but one that was there last night is totally gone along with the Humzooer, trippygolightly? I know that I have been party to name-calling and angry rants about the other side, but some of the comments I found last night on other sites were downright disgusting. I like to think that I wouldn’t type something that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face, which is designed to keep me from flying off the handle and blatantly insulting another person, but I probably deserve at least a few punches in the stomach for some of my comments.
As I perused these blog wastelands, I realized that almost all substance and real debate had been replaced with silly name-calling and hugely exaggerated ‘reports’ of the candidate on the other side. It’s easy to get sucked into the crap vortex of it all, but the truth is that it is almost all nitpick, buzzword infected garbage that only perpetuates the false idea that we are very different people with very different needs in life.
I read an interesting book last week called ‘The Great Derangement’, by Matt Taibbi, who is a Rolling Stone writer. Although he is a New England liberal and his politics are embedded in the book, the idea of it transcended politics and focused mostly on how insane some Americans have become. He spent time ‘undercover’ in John Hagee’s church in San Antonio, where people believe that the end of the world is near, and that Democrats want to force everyone to denounce God, live in public housing, and have mandatory abortions. They (and he) prayed for Scooter Libby and that the vengeance of God would fall upon his perpetrators.
On the flip side, he spent months with ultra left-wing 9/11 conspiracy theorists that blame George Bush and the Republicans for everything bad that has ever happened in the world and actually believe that 9/11 was an inside job.
These two groups are the same crazy people that essentially will fight to the death to preserve their absurd and perverted views on life. They just happen to sit on opposite sides of the fence. The scary thing is the large percentage of Americans that fall on one side or another of this extremism. He cited one poll that shows that 30% percent of Americans believe that the government was involved in or knew about the attack before it happened.


I am in dire need of common sense and sanity returning to how to talk about and implement politics in this country. I feel that our future is being stolen by delusional fringe groups that happen to shout a lot louder and much more frequently than average folks. I don’t really know how to find the middle ground sometimes. If I’m attacked, I’m inclined to fight back, and the more it happens, the nastier it gets. So, with that being said, I am resigning to the fact that I am not going to change your mind, and that you are likely not going to change mine. That doesn’t mean that we are morons, although some of us almost insist on proving that we are, and it doesn’t change the fact that most non-insane Americans basically want the same fundamental things in life, and want the freedom to choose their own path.
It really isn’t the end of the world either way, unless of course, the crazies are right.