I ran into this on another forum..it so captured my sentiments that I decided to share..credit to Jim Rom:
About the Wall..,.,
The funding for the wall has been the withheld treat since as far back as I can remember. Every time a Republican is in office and wants a wall, the Democrats talk about how racist it is. Then they get in office and want a wall, the Republicans talk about how many other issues should be addressed instead. It's a never-ending circle of each party wanting to be the one that can take credit for fixing immigration, which is a problem that wouldn't exist if our government hadn't turned this country into a potential cash cow for anyone who managed to cross a border.
Both sides of the aisle brag about what they have done, will do, or can do to fix immigration, but neither side will let the other get any traction on actually enacting those fixes because it might steal their own bragging rights. On the other hand, neither side has ever really dug in and fought to get their own fixes implemented because that just might be the issue that keeps them in power. And we let them continue to do the same song-and-dance routine over and over again because we hope that this time, they actually will fix the problem like they've promised and failed to do all the other times we elected them. Bonus, most people can't even be mad about it because we did this to ourselves.
People seem to forget that the government works for us, as a nation, to enact the will of the people. Instead of using the election process as the carrot and stick combination that it was designed to be, we use it as the scorecard for a personality pageant. "Yeah, the other candidate has more experience and is probably better qualified, but I like this person better" seems to be the deciding factor for about 50% of voters, while another 30% or so have a very basic and skewed knowledge of what either candidate actually said because instead of actually listening to the candidates and making up their own minds they'd rather get the information from the evening news after it was filtered through the thought processes of a dozen people so that it could be spun in a way that matched their viewership's biases. Probably another 10% of voters are so blinded by partisanship that they range from those who can barely acknowledge that the other side is human to those that couldn't admit the other side was right if they were tortured. That leaves about 10% of us who are actually paying attention to the issues and the people who we hired to fix problems, and that 10% is vastly outnumbered.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us at the point where what was once the "Information Age" is now the "Disinformation Age". Both sides of the government lie to us on a regular basis, and we defend them because the other side's lying is a) worse or b) justifies the lying by our own side. That's like saying if one of your teenage daughters gets pregnant in high school, it's okay for the other teenage daughter to have unprotected sex. As George Carlin, who probably had a better grasp on how real-world politics works than any outsider currently alive, once said, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." When he said that, we all laughed it up because in our minds it's so true. What we didn't realize at the time is that he was, in fact, talking about us. We're idiots, folks, and we've elected the lunatics to run the asylum. We've got people like Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump making policy because we all forgot that we had a job to do; we had the job of electing the best person available to fill the position, and we haven't been doing it. That doesn't mean picking between two candidates that shmoozed their way through their own party's top brass and entertained the masses, it means looking at every available candidate for the position, pointing at them, and saying "That one, that one has the best ability and qualifications to do this job." Who gives a damn what party the candidate is a member of? If you're hiring someone for a job, the last question you need to ask them is "What is your political affiliation?"
And all of that leads us to the point where we now stand. Think about it: We don't have two parties anymore, we have two governments that rotate on an irregular basis and they are at war with one another. We, collectively, have accepted the oligarchy. Until we all figure out that we, the masses, are actually on the same side and do something about it we will continue to fight about issues that should never have been issues to begin with and are only perpetuated to keep us fighting.
About the Wall..,.,
The funding for the wall has been the withheld treat since as far back as I can remember. Every time a Republican is in office and wants a wall, the Democrats talk about how racist it is. Then they get in office and want a wall, the Republicans talk about how many other issues should be addressed instead. It's a never-ending circle of each party wanting to be the one that can take credit for fixing immigration, which is a problem that wouldn't exist if our government hadn't turned this country into a potential cash cow for anyone who managed to cross a border.
Both sides of the aisle brag about what they have done, will do, or can do to fix immigration, but neither side will let the other get any traction on actually enacting those fixes because it might steal their own bragging rights. On the other hand, neither side has ever really dug in and fought to get their own fixes implemented because that just might be the issue that keeps them in power. And we let them continue to do the same song-and-dance routine over and over again because we hope that this time, they actually will fix the problem like they've promised and failed to do all the other times we elected them. Bonus, most people can't even be mad about it because we did this to ourselves.
People seem to forget that the government works for us, as a nation, to enact the will of the people. Instead of using the election process as the carrot and stick combination that it was designed to be, we use it as the scorecard for a personality pageant. "Yeah, the other candidate has more experience and is probably better qualified, but I like this person better" seems to be the deciding factor for about 50% of voters, while another 30% or so have a very basic and skewed knowledge of what either candidate actually said because instead of actually listening to the candidates and making up their own minds they'd rather get the information from the evening news after it was filtered through the thought processes of a dozen people so that it could be spun in a way that matched their viewership's biases. Probably another 10% of voters are so blinded by partisanship that they range from those who can barely acknowledge that the other side is human to those that couldn't admit the other side was right if they were tortured. That leaves about 10% of us who are actually paying attention to the issues and the people who we hired to fix problems, and that 10% is vastly outnumbered.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us at the point where what was once the "Information Age" is now the "Disinformation Age". Both sides of the government lie to us on a regular basis, and we defend them because the other side's lying is a) worse or b) justifies the lying by our own side. That's like saying if one of your teenage daughters gets pregnant in high school, it's okay for the other teenage daughter to have unprotected sex. As George Carlin, who probably had a better grasp on how real-world politics works than any outsider currently alive, once said, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." When he said that, we all laughed it up because in our minds it's so true. What we didn't realize at the time is that he was, in fact, talking about us. We're idiots, folks, and we've elected the lunatics to run the asylum. We've got people like Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump making policy because we all forgot that we had a job to do; we had the job of electing the best person available to fill the position, and we haven't been doing it. That doesn't mean picking between two candidates that shmoozed their way through their own party's top brass and entertained the masses, it means looking at every available candidate for the position, pointing at them, and saying "That one, that one has the best ability and qualifications to do this job." Who gives a damn what party the candidate is a member of? If you're hiring someone for a job, the last question you need to ask them is "What is your political affiliation?"
And all of that leads us to the point where we now stand. Think about it: We don't have two parties anymore, we have two governments that rotate on an irregular basis and they are at war with one another. We, collectively, have accepted the oligarchy. Until we all figure out that we, the masses, are actually on the same side and do something about it we will continue to fight about issues that should never have been issues to begin with and are only perpetuated to keep us fighting.
