Glibbertysmidgeon

In yesterday’s post, I listed just a few of the things that are going terribly wrong in our country. Today, I’m thinking about how our lawmakers are dealing with these large and pressing problems. Here’s a sampling of what our public servants have been up to lately:

• Holding a three day debate on a doomed constitutional ammendment to ban gay marriage.
• Blowing a lot of hot air about those dangerous Mexican immigrants, and arguing about how to stop them.
• Holding a vote on another doomed constitutional ammendment – this one to ban flag burning. (Note: three other countries have or had flag burning bans: China, Iran, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein)

These are all red herrings.
Rather than taking responsiblility for their disastrous failures and criminal behavior here and abroad, our elected officials are trying to distract us.
With elections looming in November and a growing public outrage over the war and numerous corruption scandals, they’re trying to create some outrage about issues they can control.

Let’s go down to New Orleans and see if they care more about gay marriage or building levees.

And let’s really think about flag burning. Studies show that there have been about 4 instances of flag burning in the past 20 years. This is more important than the health care crisis?

Let’s not get me started on illegal immigration. I need to write a whole post on that topic. Suffice it to say that this is another way to use people’s prejudice to stir up some votes.

The new politics is about appealing the absolute lowest, knee jerk, bigoted caveman in all of us. Forget about reason, let’s just make voters mad. Let’s appeal to the HATE in all Americans. That’ll get us re-elected.

But who wants to live in a country run by hate?

I want to go and see An Inconvenient Truth, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

Okay, what I really want is to HAVE SEEN it.
I want to know what is in the movie; I want to be able to discuss it intelligently with my friends.. but I’m afraid to actually sit through it. I know I’ll walk out crying, with one more horrible, heavy truth lying cold on my heart.

I’ve considered buying a ticket- just to show my support, and then going home to ask a friend for the half-page synopsis. If I could only believe that my $10.00 contribution to the success of the film might still, somehow, save us all from Global Warming.

In recent months, I’ve begun reverting to the old ways- devolving into the Ostritch Girl I was raised up to be. When I was a little girl, I hated when my Dad watched the news.

I didn’t want to know about the wars going on in other countries or the people who lost their homes in the big storm. I was not interested in police shootouts or drug raids.

I couldn’t fix my Dad’s depression or my grandmother’s frailty; I couldn’t find Dad a steady job or provide a place where we all could live and never have to move. My own problems had already shown me how small and powerless I was.

I just wanted to read my Black Stallion books and imagine that everything could be solved with a child’s patience and a long, bareback ride.

I understand why someone would rather watch American Idol than listen to the truth about what the U.S. is doing to innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.
I understand why it’s more appealing to mow the lawn than to have a serious discussion about the proper balance between national security and individual liberties.
I understand that it was bad enough to watch the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and our government’s disastrous inabilty to respond- but how are we all supposed to digest the additional insult of the 2 billion in tax dollars that have been blown on waste and fraud in the rebuilding effort?

And the bad news just keeps coming.

• Trans fats may cause diabetes.
• Bird flu has been transmitted from human to human here in the U.S.
• Tuna is no longer safe for pregant women.
• I’m STILL the only person in my family who has health insurance.
• The suicide rate in New Orleans has tripled.
• There are many, many reasons to believe our elections are being cheated.
• The phone and cable companies are trying to kill my blog and all it’s little friends.
• Every day we find that another of our elected officials is actually a criminal.
• The President has issued 100’s of “signing statements” indicating in each one that he finds himself to be above legally enacted U.S. laws.
• The East Coast is flooding.
• Oil prices keep going up.
• People keep dying in Iraq.

…and the hurricane season is here, and the levees are not repaired.

It’s enough to make me want to stick my head in the sand.
Or into a children’s book.