Found my way to redstate today. Yikes.
The political discourse in this country has become so degraded and polluted that the very idea of common ground feels impossible. When working across the aisle is being openly compared to betrayal and treason you gotta know things have gone too far. The trouble doesn’t even stem from one side, though the right does do vitriol far better than the left. I think that is where the difficulty in having constructive conversations comes from. There seems to be little stomach for it to begin with, and to make matters worse it feels like each side of this so-called political conflict is operating from a different playbook.
The most recent example is the dichotomy between Trump’s sexual exploits being widely accepted as boys will be boys behavior and anything that the so-called left does regarding sex suddenly triggering a moral landslide where the offending party ought to be run out of the nation entirely. It goes back to the classic argument of we can do it because we have the power, but you cannot. And here I thought that particular America dissolved decades ago.
What I have noticed people relying on lately is the short attention span and shorter memory of their target audiences. The goal appears to be to get these voters good and riled up and then point them towards the polls to execute an agenda that, on both sides, is triggered by the wealthy. Each side has different methods of guilting you to the poll and ultimately has different smaller and side projects they focus on. The Right wants to expand oil and build more stuff on more of the protected lands. The left wants to shed student debt and protect the lands from oil and drilling. Both primarily want to be in charge and be held responsible for the positive financial news. Both are slaved to the stock market like a bobble head on a dashboard. We rise and fall by its measure, and its measure is based on the opinions of those who have wealth.
So isn’t it really just a giant circle of crazy. That is a part of capitalism that worries me. In the end we wind up just chasing profit at the cost of the people who bled to make that profit and who are ultimately the same ones buying what is sold.