Sometimes I will watch the news and because of it being on cable, with the pundits yelling and the antics that go on, it can all seem like theater. I can watch all the information about the birthers or the health care people thinking there are going to be death panels and in the back of my mind, because it’s on TV, I can think there’s exaggeration in it. It still gets me upset, because I think some weak willed people might think its true, but I try to have faith that the American people will see through the rhetoric.

I’m starting to lose my faith in that.

The President is going to talk to the nation’s kids in school on Tuesday. It’s akin to Nancy Reagan telling kids “Just Say No” to drugs or George Bush asking kids to collect money for Afghanistan kids. The President, from all indications, is going to tell kids to work hard and stay in school. There’s nothing wrong at all with that.

The Department of Education handed out some educational material to go along with the speech. It was not an edict but a recommendation of what teachers can do to understand who the President is and how to use the information given. When I was a young kid our teacher had us watch Roots and we had to write about the show. I don’t know if the teacher came up with it or if it was something handed down from the Department of Education, but we did the material. No big deal about that.

Some conservatives are worried the speech will be some indoctrination speech, something akin to some socialist dictator preparing the youth of the nation to rise up against parents. It was all theater to me, as I said, until I saw a lot of local coverage of the event. In my area there are parents who are going to take their kids out of school that day. The superintendent of schools had talked about not airing the talk. The parents I saw really believe the President is going to change their kids with one speech.

This reminds me of the debates on movie websites you can see every day. You have people arguing the merits of a film not released to the public, basing their opinion on rumors. What is more disturbing is the people who have had the most say about whipping parents into a frenzy to remove their kids from school that day have been pundits like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They haven’t been the only ones because this morning, while I traveled along early in the morning, I listened to the local radio talk shows. The conservatives were even more radical than the three mentioned as far as putting the fear of Obama into parents.

This whole thing about distrust about Obama has gotten worse. Some of the non-conservative talk show hosts are postulating their own reasons for the Obama mistrust and with the hysterical talk going on their conclusions are beginning to make sense in a sad sort of way. More and more some speculate there are people who just can’t get over the fact a black man is running the country. I would have considered this borderline crackpot theory a few months ago but it’s starting to ring true for me. I wonder how far this will go; how much will things get piled on by the conservatives until we aren’t able to know what is truth and fiction.

I feel like I’m living in a cautionary science fiction movie like Soylent Green, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live. In those movies it was easy to know who the villains were. We could see their motivation a mile away. In the real world it’s tougher because, and this is being fair to some conservatives, it was only a few months ago, when George Bush was in office, anything he did was evil or manipulative. Halliburton and Blackwater were evil phrases and everyone in the administration was a criminal and there was proof of that if anyone wanted to listen. At least that was the view of the liberals. Now with Obama in power it’s the conservatives who are finding evil in every phrase and movement. All we want is a government that will protect us and help us when we need it. What we’re getting is partisan theater and it’s getting old.

 

<< PREVIOUS
NEXT >>

Copyright © Chaotic Fringe LLC. All rights reserved.

Svengali Obama - September 04, 2009
Home | News | Entertainment | Blog | Podcast | IMVN | Everquest 2 | Links | Photos | V-Blog