Money talks and bullshit walks...

There has been a lot chatter across the Internet and Facebook about the latest budget woes. The conservative right was able to make a lot of noise about troops not being paid on time and the left raised hell about not approving a budget that cut out funding for planned parenthood. I saw ripping post waves from both sides about "Provide funding for our troops" and "We must protect a woman's right to choose" all across Facebook. "Repost this if you agree" on social networking sites and forming little groups on-line is fine. It makes us all feel like we're doing something to address the problem. But do we really have an understanding of what the problem is? I don't think it's party hot-issues being threatened or worries about government workers being paid on time.

The problem is that nobody can ever be wrong. Starting from the idea that "Everyone should be allowed to express their opinions freely" we've somehow let it expand into "Every Opinion is equal" and that's just flat out stupid. Opinions are not equal, we look at many ideas so that we can find the best way out of all of them but that second part is what makes it work... finding a best way. Without a "best way" that exchange of ideas is reduced down into a way for people just to feel better about having gotten to have their say. Now that would be alright still if we put our thoughts into an open forum, but we don't. Culturally we've become hardwired to seek approval for our ideas by finding outlets that cater to them. Your Limbaugh, Maddow, Frankin, Beck... your MSNBC, Fox News, and your talk radio, they all speak strictly to their target audiences. We move past the exchange of ideas completely into a system where we hear ideas that fit "What we like" and we hear about how against "What we like" the other people must be. All sides claim to speak for the American people. And relative to the specific audience they do, in a way, speak for the country. But is that what we want?

Do we want political discourse dictated by what we want to believe? A lot of what I've written about in previous posts has to do with the dangers of letting what we wish were true define what we accept as true. And the pundits are a huge part of that. John Stewart is funny but is raw sarcasm the way to go? Beck holds up his version of "The Founders" but we can't build a country that was designed to operate in a world that passed by 225 years ago. At the same time we can't anticipate abandoning all moral principle because we're afraid of what will happen. O'riely and Hannity are just as bad as Maher and Huffington in that they all sit there night after night and re-polarize their audience.

Yellow Journalism isn't anything new, and you'd think by now that we'd be better equipped to deal with it. Instead we've made it part of our personal identity.

So what comes next? Problems like what we saw this week in Washington are what you get when we elect congressmen who are so terrified of losing their extreme party base and alienating their own side's talking heads and pundits that they do nothing. They can't compromise and the "other side" is in the same situation so they can't make moves either.

I'm disappointed that hot button issues like abortion and the threat of soldiers (and government workers) not getting paid are distressing but the situation that got us here is a broken government and people so stuck on their own "opinions" that they won't allow or elect congress-people capable of fixing it.
Bunker in. The problems are just starting.