“If nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then the only thing that matters is who yells the loudest.”– unknown
In the absence of principle man will pursue power with all the energy in his possession. I read the above quote somewhere when someone was talking about what they thought was wrong with America. What he was trying to say was in the absence of shared principles and ideas about truth, that there was nothing to talk about. All communication requires a shared context and without that we can’t even disagree, because even disagreement implies a common ground to disagree over. As a description of the current political scene I think he is absolutely right. All is noise.
I remember during Obama’s campaign I used to sit and turn the TV back and forth between CSNBC and FOX. What absolutely amazed me was that these 2 “news” organizations would describe an event and if you didn’t know better you would say that it was 2 different events. It seemed to be 2 different worlds with each claiming to be the “only real news.”
What I liked most about Obama is that he seemed to promise that it was possible for principle to triumph over power. He seemed to give promise that the loudest noise didn’t have to win again. He seemed to say that politics didn’t have to be the art of calling your opponent the worst name that you could get the most people to believe. I still like that.
I listened to Rush Limbaugh talk about how he hopes the president of the United States would fail. I thought about how many people I know are going through really hard times and what that failure would mean for all of us and I knew what Rush Limbaugh thinks of me. I knew he was noise and his only weapon was to render us all helpless in the storms of his noise.
Watching it all I am really concerned. I am by no stretch of the imagination a political wizard. What I don’t know would fill many large boats. But listening to the start of the Obama time I can’t help feeling like so many people would be content if it was all a battle to see who could yell the loudest.
The truth is that some things are right and some things are wrong. One of my favorite movies is one called the “Marathon Man” with Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier. One of the things that Olivier’s character keeps asking Hoffman’s is, “Is it safe….Is it safe….Is it safe….” If you have the misfortune to be sick and dependent on our health care system the answer for too many people is simple, “It is not safe.” It sure seems like it should be.
