My inbox went quiet.
Are we in a constitutional crisis, is it the end of the world as we know it, or is it business as usual?
I DON'T KNOW!
The internet is de rigueur. Everybody's got a smartphone. Technologically we're up to date, but emotionally we haven't digested the change.
Twenty-odd years ago we would have turned on the TV and been told what was right, by esteemed personages we believed more intelligent and more informed than ourselves.
But now we know most of the talking heads are overpaid wankers and the experts...EVERYBODY'S AN EXPERT NOW! My opinion is as good as theirs, so is yours.
And frighteningly, not a single so-called expert got it right last November.
So is this just an issue of two camps, each in their own silo?
It certainly isn't about fake news, that's a canard employed by those who are living in the last century. People have the power of discernment, WHEN THEY WANT TO! But they like reading stories that reinforce their viewpoint. But where did they get said viewpoint to begin with?
There's been all this talk of the Saturday Night Massacre. And yes, Nixon had just been reelected, but we'd come off the sixties, an era of tumult, everything appeared to be up for grabs. But today our heroes are Ivy League dropouts who run the internet and billionaires, sometimes the same people. We've got so many channels we can afford to cut the cord. The wall fell and Communism ended and it was supposed to be clear sailing.
Only it isn't.
So you flip the channels and hear diametrically opposed views. And this is one crisis wherein the written word does not suffice, we want talking heads, we want live, we want video, we don't want to read, we're living it in real time, EXPLAIN IT TO US!
But what they're not explaining is how we got here.
I'm not talking the 109 days since Trump became President, but the changes in our country that allowed him to become President.
And one thing's for sure, we've got no idea of the temperature of the country, will not until there's another election. Hell, look at France, the good guy won, but the polls were off significantly, it was never that close.
And is this about math? With the Republicans in power so it's business as usual?
Is this about carpetbaggers or ineptitude?
And it's hard to see this as being confined to D.C. when our health care lies in the balance, when so many are struggling economically, never in my lifetime have more people been looking for guidance.
But we're not getting any!
We've got a bunch of talking heads and no leaders, no one to get behind.
And it's a veritable field day for the news business, this is what they live for.
And Fox's ratings have taken a hit since O'Reilly got canned or is what's happening here bigger than Fox/MSNBC, bigger than 538/Hannity. Is this what happens in a culture where money is exalted and everything else is trivial and those who've got it rule and those who don't try to climb the greased totem pole and...
How can you trust the biased, money-making media to begin with?
It's the best we've got, but it's not good enough.
I have no idea what's going on, what the pulse of the country is. There are no markers, nothing definitive.
This is the new reality. We can connect for free over thousands of miles but we've never been so disconnected in our entire lives.
There is no such thing as multitasking.
Short attention span millennials are a hoax.
We've got endless platitudes that are incorrect, their explanatory powers nonexistent.
It's just you and me, arguing, going to bed looking at the ceiling wondering...
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
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