you may see them drowning as you stroll along the beach,
but don’t throw out the lifeline till they’re clean out of reach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP4D-nTnWv4

as time goes by, i am increasingly fascinated by the state of politics in our nation. the obama election fervor gave way to tea party people to now the coffee party movement.  (hot chocolate is inevitable.) everyone is flailing around, waiting for the end of the world. now,  i’m not from the big joiners of the world, but i’ve just signed up to get more info from the coffee party. for one thing, i like the fact that they don’t see government as a fundamental part of the problem.

see, we all know government has a way of FUBARing things. any large organization hits a point where the right hand and the left hand may be actually attached to different bodies without realizing it — and they may also have had that artificial extra arm put on for good measure, which maybe the other two arms don’t know about… that being said, to basically discount government completely and advocate solutions that completely ignore it’s existence is absurd.

government is HERE.

(if you don’t like that, start building your spaceship now.)

frankly, i am tired of all the talking heads on television — on the left, on the right, and everywhere else in between. so many of these people are not actually journalists. they are entertainers. they don’t require any sort of allegiance to journalistic integrity. they do, however, owe an allegiance to their sponsors. and as such, they try to be as bombastic as possible to get the best possible ratings.

now, i know it’s a free country, and i’m all about free speech. but there was a time when those who imparted news information did so with adherences to certain principles. can you ever have news that is bias-free? not unless you can create a human that is bias-free. but, that being said, these individuals took their responsibility to the american public very seriously. there are so many amazing journalists, it is difficult to pick one. but i’ll pick a talking head who was very well-known to people from my generation and older: walter cronkite.

now, whether you liked ol’ walter or not, he read the news. he read news that was as factual as possible. he didn’t usually froth at the mouth about that damned viet cong or those dirty hippies or that absurd idiot president known as nixon. he just told you what happened. and that’s the way it was. i think his most famous out-of-the-box moments that were not labeled as commentaries involved his amazement at the lunar landing and his tears when he had to report the passing of president kennedy.  when he winces after reporting the president’s death, and his voice breaks just a tad, that speaks volumes.

and that would be pretty acceptable commentary from a news anchor.

but these talking heads — and i don’t need to list them — they incite, they froth, they manipulate people. these heads use the decades of credibility built on the shoulders of people like cronkite and murrow and so many, many others. people who taught the television audience: if news is reported here, great care has been taken to give you just the facts as we can best present it.

these modern marvels take all that good work and they twist it.

and now, americans used to getting information from people with integrity assume that the people they are watching are giving them factual information. the heads have made our government and political processes into spectator sports. there are clear winners. there are clear losers.

anyone who has been a student of politics knows that no such thing exists in a functioning legislature. orrin hatch and ted kennedy became best pals not because they shared any ideology; they became best pals working in the congress while developing compromise. things most important to them, they fought for. but they also gave way to the other and tried to make legislation that was a workable peace. to think you will successfully develop legislation without compromise is to not know anything about the legislative process.

and yet now, these talking heads are whipping the public into all-or-nothing scenarios. if legislation doesn’t end up looking like this — or if it isn’t completely killed — we are somehow marching toward armageddon. and the public, in turn, gets mad at any legislator who attempts compromise, as if that is not a noble pursuit.

anyway, i am glad to learn more about the coffee party. i, for one, think the end of the world is avoidable if we all start to communicate in realistic ways. if we stop seeing each other as the enemy. if we see the world as it is and start to incrementally work toward a future in which we can all live.

see, i’ve got kids. and i’ll be damned if the world ends on my watch.