Like someone who can’t take their eye off a train-wreck, I regularly read the daily news to see what kind of political disaster has transpired in the previous 24 hours.  Sadly,  I am seldom disappointed.  Lately however I have been curious about how my fellow Americans are taking the same input so I read the “Comments”.  Ouch.

Since when did it become the norm to start a comment with “Hey Moron….”?  One other very disturbing trend is the apparent hatred from a lot of our United States towards California.  Some of the proposed new changes in our Tax Code would land squarely on a large percentage of California tax payers and homeowners; I’m one of them.   But it appears that a lot of the Country is happy to hear this and they have this misplaced vision that we are all rich and deserve to pay more taxes anyway.  Well, that’s a political matter not a matter of common decency.

But when almost every comment is laced with derogatory comments it becomes dulling and dispiriting to discover how much animus is floating around out there.  I didn’t read the “Comments” Pre-Trump but I’m going to stop short of blaming him for this behaviour because i suspect he is a symptom, not the cause but Jeez people, really?

First off, EVERYBODY knows that in polite company you don’t discuss Religion or Politics.  Strip away those two facets of our lives and we have a lot in common.  I’m guessing that as people were getting mowed down in Las Vegas nobody on the ground was worried about whether the person helping them, or the person they were helping, was a “Liberal” or a “Conservative”.  Same goes for the Church shooting from the other day.  Sure, it was a small town in Texas so it was probably more Trump voters than not, but in circumstances like that, and for the most part, in our every day lives, those labels should not matter and we sure as hell should not be calling each other names simply because we disagree about Tax Code.

The current Governing Bodies have shown themselves to be absolutely corrupt and inept.  Note I don’t point out the Republicans or the Democrats because, in my mind, they are all at fault.  There is an “aisle”; learn to walk across it.  As Barack Obama so famously said in the speech that propelled him into the political spotlight “There are no Red States or Blue States, there are only the United States of America”.  This was a the democratic convention just 4 years before he would become president.  I had pulled over to the side of the road in Illinois because my radio signal was fading and his speech was riveting.  I said to myself right then and there that this guy was going to be President some day.  He was but he presided over a dysfunctional Government that has yet to right itself.

It actually scares me when I hear people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan spout bold-faced lies in their speeches and sound bites.  Absolute CRAP coming from the leaders of the House and Senate; powerful figures in our Democracy talking out of their asses.  Add to this a President that resorts to name calling even when it involves the leader of a Nuclear Power (North Korea and their “Little Rocket Man”).  Now this name calling has become commonplace and, like I said, I’m probably sure this was going on pre-Tump but now he has legitimised it.  An organisation mirrors itself from the top down.  I know because as an Entrepreneur I was at the top many times and saw how my actions affected the people working with me or under me.  No, we need a class act at the top to keep the “Swamp” from getting nasty.  Unfortunately our current President did not drain the swamp, he diverted the sewage from Wall Street and Dumb Ass Street into our Capital.  He’s nominating people into positions of power that are so outrageously unqualified it would be laughable if it wasn’t our Country at stake, but I wander here.

I am profoundly sad at what I see happening to our culture, our heritage, our civilisation.  Instead of hearty dialog with proper boundaries of behaviour, we now live in a cowboy state where decent men (and women) are calling each other “Morons” and then we have “Morons” like most of the President’s mouthpieces, spouting lie after lie after lie supporting the consummate moron, our President.

God Bless of America and let’s hope that something happens soon to correct the direction we are currently on.  It’s bad people.  Really bad.  What are you, a fucking moron?  (LOL).  Just kidding.

 

Joe Jeter

November 9, 2017 (From Melbourne, Australia)