It’s Sewer Time!
– by David Matthews 2
There’s a foul stench in the air.
It’s a repugnant odor that is emanating everywhere. It’s in everything we see and everything we hear.
It fouls our meals, our mail, our polite conversations with friends and family, even our places of work and places of prayer.
It pervades into our phone lines, harassing us endlessly with its foul prefabricated noise, making sure that there is no place in our world that they have not perverted and corroded.
And it only gets worse from this point on. It gets more and more putrid, more and more repulsive, sapping the strength, the will, the resolve of people to try to avoid it and to move on to more important things.
I am, of course, talking about politics.
This is politics at its worst right now… that rare time just weeks before Election Day when everything that a politician says or does becomes instant analysis. When media personalities on radio and cable television become willing whores for political parties, exploiting their positions to send campaign messages under the false banner of “neutrality”. When so-called “experts” proclaim to know what we think and try to steer us towards their preferred candidates. When we are inundated with daily and semi-daily and even moment-to-moment polling to try to tell us how we will vote. When lies and damned-dirty lies are force-fed down our throats every other minute, and even when fact-checked and proven to be lies, there is no attempt to remove them from their airwaves, or even to apologize for airing them.
This is the time when the sage advice of comedians and writers and philosophers one and all about the irredeemable qualities of all of the candidates on the ballot are validated. They’re all greedy, self-centered, corrupt, dishonorable liars. They’re all on the take. They all will say anything and everything to get elected. They all will promise the moon, a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and of course a return to happier and prosperous days… oh, and all babies must eat! They are all “outsiders” and also “career politicians”. They are all “experienced” and at the same time “inexperienced”. They are all “honest” and yet lie through their teeth. They are all beholden to special interest groups, and yet claim to be “mavericks”. They side with extremist factions, and yet also promise to be “mainstream”.
This is the time when all of the dirty little secrets about the candidates come out. All of the incendiary things that they did, all of the questionable antics and backroom deals that were brokered… all of the things that were held back until JUST BEFORE the election!
Did the candidates really think that these little secrets wouldn’t see the light of day? Did they think that their opponents wouldn’t use these little secrets in their campaigns?
Or perhaps that’s just part of the whole game in the first place.
Either way, the whole thing has become rancid, and the stench makes this commentator want to just turn off everything! Turn off the TV set, not read the newspaper, stop listening to the radio, stick to online role-playing games, unplug the telephone, and not talk with ANYONE until after Election Day!
Of course the whole thing is meant to be rancid at this point. It’s MEANT to make you sick to your stomach, to turn you off the whole process, to not want anything to do with the world around you.
It’s all meant to keep YOU from voting.
Let’s get brutally honest here… this whole election process is a matter of numbers, and if the party players and their constituents cannot count on your vote, then they don’t want you to be anywhere NEAR the ballot box, period!
That’s why the GOP is touting those so-called “tea party” candidates. They know that those folks are pissed-off enough to show up at the polling place, so of course they want them to vote GOP. But that’s it. They don’t want anyone else voting.
It’s worked before. Look at the 1994 mid-term election. Here you had the worst turnout in history, with twenty percent of the electorate bothering to show up at the polls, and those were people that were already disgusted with the system and were willing to vote for ANYONE! They would have voted for Benito Mussolini in a heartbeat, even with him dead for fifty years, just to get the trains to run on time again. And given some of the candidates out there today, voting for a foreign fascist dictator that has been dead for over a half-century would actually be a better alternative!
And that is what the GOP wants to have happen again. They want voters to be so disgusted with the process that the bulk will just want to stay home, leaving only their extreme diehard supporters to decide who gets control of the Congress.
Unfortunately once again the Democrats are so useless they can’t offer any real alternative, and they have defaulted to their “standing still is the better alternative” tactic. Sure they’ll sling mud, but they won’t offer anything substantive, because they know that the leadership in the Congress is incompetent.
But while we’re getting nauseated by the stench, there ARE alternatives out there. They’re lost in the utter sewer sludge, but they are there. We’re talking REAL alternatives; THIRD-PARTY candidates, not these prefabricated phonies that call themselves “tea party candidates”. THOSE are the people you need to vote for if you are disgusted with the whole “business as usual” game. “Tea Party” people ARE NOT ALTERNATIVES! They’re just pissed-off versions of the GOP still living in denial that they’re still getting jerked around by the media personalities on radio and cable TV.
That probably explains why the politicians are quick to get us from the traditional voting machines to the digital ones… because the levers on those old machines look way too much like the lever of a toilet.
This is a sewer of OUR creation. WE allowed this to happen by continually supporting Democrats and the GOP over and over and over again because we REFUSE to vote for REAL alternatives.
It is high time we did something about this sewer, because the stench is too much to have to continually put up with.
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