My brilliant conclusion is, it’s a lot! Staggering revelation, right? I promise I will keep my day job. But stay with me a minute. Think about the volume of stories, allegations and investigations that have appeared in the news since 45 took office. You wake up and see his 3 a.m. tweets laden with personal insults or distracting fake news; by midday you see a headline with another US-Russian connection; on your way home from work you hear about proposed legislation that’s going to harm certain groups of Americans or immigrants; and then you go to bed hearing that there’s yet another collusive White House plot being investigated.
Seriously, this is extremely stressful for all of us. We don’t always know or feel exactly how much stress we’re experiencing, and we often fail to recognize the stress snowball that’s amassing on our heels until it catches up and smacks us square in the head. Perhaps like me, you find yourself engaged in a silent scream that sounds something like, OMG this world is so !$?# crazy! Or maybe you just tune it out or simply don’t care; hence you’re less stressed or stressed differently than we political followers. But you’re also passively contributing to the hijacking of our country by a group of wealthy, white, narcissistic, judgmental men. Sorry, but apathy is also an action that creates a reaction. Think Physics 101.
So how do you deal with all of the continuous political drama and the resulting stress? You can simply turn off all media feeds, although that only eliminates those feeds that you deselect. You’re still going to hear coworkers, friends and family talk about the latest “can you believe X happened or person X said or did something.” So I suggest that you engage in thinking and acting outside of the trite political box.
If you haven’t read my previous blog post, “The (un)United States of America”, I recommend doing so in order to fully understand my example of thinking outside the political box. Let’s start really thinking, talking and working on a national divorce! I’ve spoken with many people for years, but especially over the last few months, about this concept and the majority is now in favor of divorce. If you zoom out from all of the BS–all daily conflict, uncertainty, allegations, proposed legislation and the 45 fake news tweets–you can’t help but see that we’ve been in a marathon conflict of interests. These conflicts are old and are never resolved, just temporarily tilted in favor of the party with the most congressional votes. And that’s the problem. We’re split down the middle and we tilt a bit left for four years, then we tilt a bit right for the next four years. The end result is half of the country is always unhappy and or underrepresented. We are a government and a nation for and by the politicians and the special interests behind them, not for and by the people.
Tweaking our electoral college, swapping out a few senators or representatives or changing presidents will not solve our ubiquitous value differences. Maintaining our current two-party system continues to be an exercise in frustration and futility. We have irreconcilable differences that have never been resolved for half of the country for over half of a century. So why not part ways and live the values each side holds dear? That’s it in a nutshell, so let’s start talking about ways we can begin the divorce process. It’s certainly better than rehashing and fighting over the same tired issues.
I welcome your thoughts and ideas and I’m happy to collate them for packaging to some of our forward thinking senators and representatives. Let’s change the antiquated discussions and try talking about ways to stop the infighting and move toward livability for both sides. And let’s do it before we look more like “War of the Rose”s…or worse.
Do You Know the Muppet Man? 