Yes We Can! Long Island 2012The media has a history of making minor blips into big news – remember the Shark Attack scare of August 2001? or the Terri Schiavo case? I am sure you can come up with a great deal more to add to this list. The point being, we must think for ourselves about what is being reported and if we believe it is an accurate portal of of the reality, if it is meant to create drama, or if it is just classic propaganda being reported for some other reason. Perspective and possible solutions are rarely reported in any depth on the TV or in our Newspapers.
In Matt Taibbi’s blog post last week, he discusses his views on the mindset of Tea Party “activists” and how it is very similar to hanging out at a State Prison in Illinois while getting drunk, cheering on the execution of a child-murderer. Read his post to understand…
He concludes with the following paragraph:
Maybe I’m wrong and we do need a national “dialogue on race,” but my guess is that if Barack Obama figures out a way to turn the economy around and create some real paying jobs, a lot of this racial angst will disappear pretty quick. If you tune out the hottest parts of the Tea Party rhetoric and just focus on who these people are, what you’ll basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government. Add a little more disposable income to that crowd and this whole debate will recede to tolerable levels. Or maybe not — but we can all hope, I guess.
Read the whole Blog post by Matt Taibbi at RollingStone.com
Economics is all that really matters in the end. An economy is either working for the masses, working for the very wealthy, or working for some other segment – the influential, the strong, hereditary, etc. – a nation’s stability and happiness are at ideal levels when the most people are part of a functioning economy. Until we begin reigning in the extremely wealthy, we will only continue to see the crazies come out to cheer an execution because they don’t have 15 dollars to spare to see Inception or Despicable Me in 3D.
There is no question that economics drives politics, at least at the lower levels, since I have never understood why people who make millions of dollars a year seem to fight so hard for even more, and that a better economy would help, but I do not think that Tea Party politics is irrelevant. They could seriously damage the president's ability to make progress where it is needed. The US is made up of numerous cultural groups with different ways of think about things, some of which I have a lot of difficulty understanding, but I know that others sometimes have difficulty understanding me and the group (actually groups) of which i am a member.