It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World
The world, I'm sorry, the arrogance of that statment...a bit more clarification, the United States has gone mad. J commented today in his sad and weary tone which revealed his state of neglect that he had lost his wife till November but I doubt that he is alone as spouses and significant others abandon their loves for the excitement and potential "change" of an election year. For the past month and a half I've been devouring political news any chance I could during breaks in work, generally sticking to CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, Time, BBC, New York Times, uh...basically most of what you would call major news organizations (minus Fox). So far what started as a race between a number of democrats with similar ideas and proposals has whittled down. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama generally agree on 90% of the issues. They both have decent records as senators and human beings. She's worked for the rights of children and women while he's worked for poor communities. She's helped get legislation related to health and education through congress, he's helped get anti-poverty, anti-weapons proliferation legislation through. Both of them, are flawed and human and are politicians who flip flop.
I posted and then took down something similar to a week ago mainly because this isn't a political blog, but then, this has seriously taken up a lot of my free time lately. I don't have any updates or responses to anything else because I've been consumed as if all of a sudden the presidency makes a bigger difference to my day to day life than my local government and local issues, which it doesn't. Still no matter how much I like one of the candidates over the other or how much I would accept the other if he won the nomination (because even if I don't agree with the details of his education, healthcare, and Iraq plans, he probably won't nominate conservative anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court as McCain probably would); I want this primary season to be over.
For all of the high ideals that both candidates wished they and their supporters stood for; the world is a far uglier place and concepts such as racial solidarity and feminism begin to become as authoritarian and intolerant as racism and sexism. The longer this race goes on, the uglier both candidates become to me. The sad part is, it's only partly their fault. The candidates fight and make up and then fight some more, while the rest of us, the pundits and the supporters fight each other.
****
What I'm talking about in the last paragraph is related to the following two articles.
2 comments:
I can't stand those arguments, that all black people *must* vote for Obama or all women for Clinton. And I do think Hillary has faced a lot of sexism from the media, but I don't think that's a good reason to choose a candidate.
Maybe I'm more cynical than you, because I don't think it's been all that bad, considering (a) the historic nature of the election and (b) the fact that it's been *so* competitive. Usually the nomination is sewn up by now, or there's a VP or some other presumptive nominee. This election has been very unusual in many ways.
I also think that there are a few crackpots out there on the fringes posting comments, writing essays, etc. but that the majority of the voting public does not feel that way.
I think it was a couple weeks ago - I made a mistake of reading reader comments to an opinion piece on a news website... and was so disheartened to see such ugliness. Although I can't vote, I've been admiring Obama (as you know :-)) but, when it comes down to it, you are right; they're BOTH politicians... and I trust that either of them will do a damn fine job compared to what's been going on the last 7 years. Politics can get people emotional but some of those emotions I saw via the comment section were extremely ugly... I wish it weren't so.
Post a Comment