The Next Civil War

Roger Kralmajales and the folks over at Gila Courier got into quite the kerfuffel this week at a thread regarding the tea party protests being organized around the country. Not surprisingly, Roger had quite the fight on his hands attempting to articulate that services like education and health care don't naturally flow out of the free market in ways that serve society. About as effectively as anything I have seen, the thread illuminates the concept of filters and lenses. A deeper cut shows that these are constructed with distinctions.

The thread shows an exchange between two sides that are both bright and educated, assuming that's the case for GC, and yet they see different planets. Distinctions create the reality we perceive, generating the cerebral space in which the mind operates, the water for the fish. Both sides have the frustrating experience that the other for reasons unknown is blind to what should be easily seen. Quite often in the blogosphere we read, "When will you take your blinders off?!"

At the recent thread, Framer attempted to educate me that his tea party efforts are protesting what is little different from the local “cloth.” This refers to the obscene squandering of precious local funds on corrupt (DTP) and inept (TREO) agencies to maintain a facade. Framer and the GC klan, I surmise, extend the same corruption and incompetence to encompass virtually the entire government. From this perspective, Obama must truly occur as a nightmare, since he oversees the government takeover of our financial institutions, auto companies, and quite possibly the health insurance system of the nation.

The flaw in such reasoning, entirely clear to Roger and myself, is that Obama (and the system in general) is not just pursuing an agenda in accordance with a philosophy. The system is reacting to dysfunction. We didn't take over General Motors because we felt like it. THIS IS CRITICAL. We didn't take over AIG out of desire. We took them over because the alternative was having them fail. THEY BROKE. Roger can say better than me if we should have let them collapse.

Without drowning in the details of derivatives, swaps, Hummers, and drug price gouging, greed and incompetence sank our banks, car companies, and is in the process of grinding our health care system to a halt. The worst presidency in history has inflicted incomprehensible damage to this nation, and on my view screen it is jaw dropping flabbergasting to hear people like Framer and the GC guys talk about Obama as the one drowning their children in debt. The ones who had the party were Bush and Cheney, AIG and Halliburton, GM and Pfizer, Cigna and Merrill Lynch, Enron and Bernie Madoff. They're the ones who threw caution to the wind, bought the hookers, gutted the system, had the orgy, and threw the country off a cliff. Obama showed up in time to be handed the bill, and as we start to address paying the tab, he's the one causing the debt?

Deregulation FAILED. Let the corporate swine play, and those at the top steal everything, destroy their own organizations, and throw the employees in the street. If we cannot trust them, then what? Shifting paradigms produce extraordinary confusion. Ironically Obama has the most challenging presidency since Abraham Lincoln, and we drift towards a Civil War of ideas. The ideas of the past have become obsolete, and the country is slipping. Ultimately solutions will prevail, and no amount of denial can reduce the numbers on the tab left for us by the previous administration's greed and incompetence. One way or another, we'll have to pay for electing Bush. The tea party crowd can bitch all day about the cost, but now that limited governance leads with certainty to corporate orgies and unbridled malfeasance, the only chance they have of living in the system they crave is to find a planet that works the way they think this one does.