There’s an excess of agitation guiding mainstream media. It’s due to the way the sides (opposites) talk to and about each other. Really, must we be snide in our assessments of others?
Of course both sides must be snide! We’re at our most glib when we have been wronged and start shouting above one another. “Crush you!” we froth.
And of course, pique makes us as shallow and wild as any who behave with no manners, no listening skills, and no conclusion other than, “Sorry, that’s just how I feel.”
It makes one brood.
Brooding is not meditation. Brooding is what we do when we’re watching someone read a book.
Ronald Reagan said at his 1981 inauguration that “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
That sentence could be restructured by changing one word, “liberals” to “adults.”
We do know so much that isn’t so, but that doesn’t stop us from howling an opinion, right? Counterfeit thinking stimulates indignation, and to think it helps or heals is artless.
Is it proof we’re after?
For heaven’s sake, we want what’s good for our health but we can’t even decide if we should wear a mask or a gun. Both are legal, and both make other people wearing or not wearing one, fume.
Did you ever catch your boy/girlfriend swimming in the creek with your former best friend? Snap! It hurts. You go quiet, you absorb the sting, you get crazy. Because you assume you were left out. But what you saw isn’t proof of anything, it’s an insecure assumption.
Same now. This is not a passing fancy, this current president. He tapped into many people’s kitchen conversations when he said he would listen to them, speak for them, keep care of them.
Pew Research says that conservative Republicans, 60 percent of them, believe global warming is not caused by human activity. That same 60 percent believes combustible engines and coal extractors and moon shoes, those foot trampolines that broke your legs, are good for the economy.
The 60 percent also resents liberals laying wreaths at the feet of scientists because scientists know much that isn’t so. Uncertain proof seems to be fine with us.
Weren’t the gospels questionable? Doesn’t the New Testament go into depth on the same stories told by four different men who heard the same thing differently? Gospel isn’t so much what Jesus said, it’s what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John said he said.
Even though Donald Trump got more votes last week than he got in the 2016 election, he came up 4 million short of winning the presidency. Yeah, well, Kennedy beat Nixon by little more than 100,000 votes.
We’ve learned this week that there’s more to learn. Gosh, who among us hasn’t thought that work is a trick to keep us busy while others make money? But we work. And we know some things.
For instance, we know that corruption does not even start to unravel when we beg the corrupt to fix it, and we know that when we sit in the garage with our oldest dearest friend and he calls Kamala Camilla, it’s okay.