Resisting the Silly Season

Sometimes politics devolves into the silly season.  We suddenly find our political discourse diverted from issues of substance, into meaningless stories that have little relevance to ourselves, our community, our nation, and planet.

All political sides, and the media that serves as their megaphones, are to blame for this.  Our social media lights fuses under these stories, creating a firestorm that engulfs us all.  All of a sudden, over the water-cooler at work, we find ourselves discussing the meaning of a retail store's display of cotton, rather than the drastic consequences, pro or con, of impending health care legislation that will effect 1/6th of the US economy, and likely touch the lives of everyone of us.

We discuss the status of an NFL quarterback and debate whether he should ever be allowed to play again, because he dared to exercise his right not to stand for the national anthem and instead kneel, and barely pay attention to the fact that we have two world leaders bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation because they can't stop one-upping each other with threats and insults.

We argue about the relevance of climate change, like Nero playing his fiddle while the consequences of it consume the world.  Juiced up hurricanes, fires in the western US, hundred year floods occurring around the world, melting glaciers, new hottest month ever occurring with regularity - all point to the reality of something many want to ignore and trivialize.  We're more interested in building a wall to keep our neighbors out, than we are in helping a neighbor in need after a devastating earthquake.

It doesn't help that we have a President who communicates mostly via tweets, blurted thoughts limited to 140 characters.  It doesn't help that we have news networks with agendas that sometimes float to the trivial.  It doesn't help that many of the stories we see are skewed to fire us up, and sometimes are downright falsehoods.  Our willingness to believe any partisan thing we see is what enables groups like the Russian hackers and troll bots to so easily manipulate our elections.  Our own gullibility increases their power to affect us.

Conservatives are especially gifted at this game.  They have for decades been able to focus the American public on side issues, from flag burning to school prayer.  Through carefully selected anecdotes and cherry-picked statistics, they have been able to promote a dismal view of the poor and minorities.  They raise the specter of non-issues and bring them to the center of public debate.There is no record of transgender use of bathrooms being a problem, yet we get consumed by it.  Voting fraud, particularly voting twice, is virtually non-existent, and yet it has risen to the level of Defcon 1, high enough that we gleefully suppress the number of people actually able to vote.

It's not that liberals don't try to play this game.  They do.  They're just not very good at it.  Fussing about who can speak at a college campus just comes across as a moronic waste of energy.  Arguing about cotton displays is just far too easy to make fun of.  Boycotting anything and everything just seems petty.  And people whining about "safe spaces?"  Don't even get me started!  

We have a lot of important issues ahead of us, folks.  Let's try to stop dwelling on the trivial, and refocus on things that really matter, that will have impact on us and our children.  It's difficult, I know.  It's hard when you hear a story of a teacher physically assaulting a child for not standing during the pledge, or when a conservative speaker is banned from a college campus, or when a celebrity says something stupid, and on and on.  It's not that we shouldn't care at all.  But we have bigger fish to fry. Our future is at stake.

Let's see what we can do to make things better for everyone.