It's been exactly ten days since the election of Senator Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States and Silly Season has already started. Actually, I'm oversimplifying it by calling it 'silly season', but that's because I continue to 'never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.' If you lend any credence to the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, the good news is (I suppose) I don't think he's malicious. But I do have to wonder if this guy and the others in their pods have the philosophic stamina to keep up their respective jeremiads every day for the next four years. On the other hand, I can remember the marathon while William Jefferson Clinton was getting mail (and some female, too, rumor has it) at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
There's impossible-to-categorize "news" stories like "Planning Underway for Obama Holiday" which, after the laws of gravity and logic are repealed, will make sense (but making sense isn't a requirement for the tribal water cooler of the Internet to pick this 'story' up and run with it-I'm afraid to imagine what this will look like by this time tomorrow) that I find disheartening because it means we may even earlier and faster than at any point until now be descending into the depths of demonization of those whose views differ from ours..
I hope I'm being unnecessarily alarmist-but almost anywhere you look on line, regardless of media outlet or its purported political/ideological orientation, you come across reader reactions that can only, at their most charitable, be called 'off topic.' It's not just disaffected supporters of those NOT elected who are angry--I think many of would have difficulty identifying specifically with whom we're upset, invoking descriptors such as 'them', or 'those, or 'the others'. And it's okay for 'us' to hate 'them' because 'they' did it to 'us' for all those years (or months, days, hours and seconds).
I mention this because very quietly in the US media (or mainstream media, MSM, as it now gets called within and without the blogsosphere) this previous Sunday passed unremarked upon for the most part the most horrible instance of intolerance in our history as a species on the planet, Kristallnacht, a moment of orchestrated insanity that set the tenor and tone for what was to be a perfect storm of intolerance meeting the assembly line producing the horror most sentient humans now, and forever, call "The Holocaust." That, too began with words, and ended with blood on everyones' hands. And to show you the link from the Southside of Chicago to Saxony, feel free to read this.
We have the most powerful resources on the planet in our history to best examine contentions and positions for accuracy and veracity and yet, far too often, because we are lazy (?), angry (?), foolish (?), afraid (?) we repeat without question whatever we have heard or read, no matter the source or agenda. For too long, I think we have been too polite in not calling those to account who offer less than accurate information or who play a little too fast and loose with their facts. No one benefits from allowing less than the truth to serve as a touchstone and benchmark. We all agreed before last Tuesday's election that we would have change in our national government--how is it that so many of us seem to have forgotten so much, so quickly? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it--but what of those unable or unwilling to repeat their remembrances?
-bill kenny
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