I'm seeing more and more political cartoons about the flood of anonymous money flowing into our political system, thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions. But that's all, just outrage from a handful of people. Doesn't this matter to the rest of us?
If you're a Republican, are you just happy that the flow of anonymous money is going to Republicans (something like 8 to 1 over Democrats)? Doesn't the effect on our democracy worry you at all? Maybe you think that the wealthy are better people than the rest of us, pretty much by definition. But does this apply to corporations? Saudi Arabian sheiks? Foreign governments? When it's hidden from sight, anything is possible.
And how about those loony Tea Partiers, who see conspiracy in every government program or policy speech by our scary black president? Doesn't vast amounts of anonymous money, flowing secretly into our political system - and into their own organizations, in fact - trip any alarm bells? Do they just not care? Or do they plan to use these right-wing corporations like corporate Republicans plan to use them? You know, the secrecy might make that difficult. And big money has a way of seducing even people who started with the best of intentions.
Or is it just ignorance and apathy? Don't know and don't care? Do you just shrug and say that both political parties are corrupt, and there's nothing we can do about it? Since you don't want to get up off the couch, not even to vote, is it easier to just give up? Oh, what's the use, huh? We thought we'd have "real change" after 2008 (like decades in the wrong direction - and human nature - could be overcome so effortlessly), and now we're depressed. Actually working to change things is just too hard, isn't it? It's easier to whine about what's going wrong.
(Ed Stein)
I'm seeing the outrage in political cartoons, but where is it in the rest of us? Do the Republicans have us all figured out? After all, they did learn from the Vietnam War, even those who stayed as far from the fighting as they could get. They learned that young people won't care what happens, as long as they aren't worried about being drafted to fight. They learned that Americans in general won't care, as long as they don't actually have to pay for a war, or for... anything else, really. They learned not to let body bags be shown on TV. These are not exactly the lessons I'd hoped they'd learn! How about you?
And what have Republicans learned about my fellow Americans these days? That we're easy to scare and still far more bigoted than we'd like to admit? That our ignorance of our own history is profound? That we're short-sighted and easily distracted? That we believe what we want to believe, and all the evidence in the world won't matter to that? That dumb, ignorant, and cowardly people are easy to lead around by the nose, especially if you give them enemies to hate?
It's really not the extremists who bother me, but the vast number of ordinary Americans who go along with this stuff. What has happened to us? In the past, extremists would be punished at the ballot box. There's a reason why the John Birch Society was a fringe group, even in the GOP. And it would take more than two years to forget who screwed up our country so badly. But now, I'm seeing outrage from political cartoonists, but apathy and disinterest from most Americans.
The polls continue to look bad for rational people. Even complete lunatics like Sharron Angle are polling well (admittedly, Christine O'Donnell seems to be a step too far, at least in Delaware, though she's polling far better than she should be). The only people who seem fired up are the same people who got us into this mess in the first place. What has happened to the rest of us? Have we all lost our minds, or just our courage?
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