The first will be the group that voted for the incoming Administration. They will be scouring the Interweb for news about improvement in the country, about how things have turned around and are getting better. They will be zealous in the defense of the Administration.
The second will be the group that voted against the incoming Administration. They will be scouring the Interweb for news about failure in the country, about how things have turned around for the worst and are declining. They will be zealous in the offense towards the Administration.
And then there will be the third group, the group that simply tunes anything having remotely to do with politics and current events out. These are the people that have simply growing tired of the festering anger and hatred that seems to ooze from every media outlet in existence, who now find themselves in a world where everything - everything - seems to be judged not on the basis of what it is but on the basis of what it possibly could imply.
(A side note of interest: could it be that comedic offerings of the current era have become so bland and low brow in an attempt to find something that no-one can take offense at and everyone can laugh it?)
As I think I have indicated before, count me in the third group. I caught myself this morning, on the most innocuous of quotes from Poor Richard (Benjamin Franklin), looking at it and saying "If I post this, 50% of the people are going to make a comment one way and 50% the other way, missing the whole actual point of the quote" - which is a ridiculous sort of place to be as it means that (once again) we have completely lost the ability to communicate in any other way except something that supports my point of view or denigrates another.
Which is not the sort of that makes one feel good at the long term future, of course. Those that find they cannot communicate with words find they have little in common, and those that have little in common eventually wonder why they are together in the first place.
Disregard my last; I don't know what happened there, and I don't even know what got sent... IF it got sent! The true beauty of computers is their ability to err at incredible speeds!
ReplyDeleteMost people think that America is "too big to fail." I've long believed that it's almost too big to succeed.
I agree with you; I don't feel good about the long term future either. No matter which side you're on, no one trusts anyone. The death of trust precipitates the death of a society...
No worries Pete: whatever you put up never made it here. As you say, faster computers just give us the ability to create errors at a faster pace.
Delete"Too big to succeed." An interesting comment, one I have never thought of that way before. I have argued for a long while that republican forms of government work best in smaller sized groupings, so perhaps it is a more eloquent way of stating that.
And you mirror my thinking on trust as well. I realized today, in a segment I heard from the hearings that the position has to represent "all of us" that really we may have reached the point that no-one believes that our government -or our fellow citizens - are willing to look out for "all of us". In which case, of course, people start looking out for themselves...