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| NEW YORK, NY - JULY 14: News Corporation headquarters is seen in Manhattan on July 14, 2011 in New York City. The widening News of the World phone hacking scandal has led to an FBI investigation in the United States. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
Much like my former work in the US Defense establishment my internet security activities sometimes create a conflict, but in general I have been good with what I've been asked to do. Little did I realize what a poisonous combination the fragmentation of specialty news channels, email, web sites, and blogging could do to wrench a country into pieces.
Over the last couple of decades I've watched, and sometimes inadvertently participated, in ripping our United States into bleeding hunks of a once viable country. I worried about politicians recrossing the Church and State boundary during the late 1970s, not realizing that religious partisanship would begin to raise its blood soaked head again. In the 1980s and 1990s we re-established the witch hunts, but not in the old way. No, now we used mass media as the tool of choice to burn people at the stake.
By the late 1990s it had spread to the once pristine Internet. Now we had mass communication on steroids. Anyone who wanted could put any nonsense up on a web site and claim it was truth, no matter how outrageous. It was like watching the 'Net being taken over by 'snake oil' salesmen. And then in the late 2000s politicians finally overcame their fear of the 'Net and began to employ it to push their agendas.In our two party system it is terribly important that we have diversity. As most folk who study systems know, diversity is key to any system's survival. Monolithic systems invariably fail at some point from lack of diversity. In the case of a representative federal republic like the United States of America this is particularly true.
In our Republic we permit multiple parties, but we seem to have stabilized around a two party system. We don't form coalitions, we're too combative for that. Instead, it's pretty clearly an "us/them" proposition. When one half of our two party system, a major part of our political system, effectively implodes, turning inward, and begins a pogrom against their own members to root out diversity, it weakens us as a nation. Ideology tests and loyalty oaths have pushed part of the country into an Orwellian nightmare, one that they cannot discriminate from the real world.
We have seen the effects of pogroms on the world stage, in Asia in the 1920s, in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. After a relatively short time those societies were rotting from within because they enforced singular ideologies and suppressed the naturally occurring diversity. Those efforts to "cleanse" their nations of improper ideology resulted in conflicts that the rest of the world has been afflicted with for over 60 years.
We really do NEED the Republican party to return from their bubble of unreality. There are existential threats to our nation out here where the rest of the world lives that must be addressed. Selfishly hiding in their own delusional world is not helping anyone, not even themselves.
The November 7th Rachel Maddow Show aired a segment reviewing the previous nights election results. Part of that episode was a call to the GOP and the Conservative movement to break out of their bubble of self-generated reality and come join the rest of us. Being a fan of Ms. Maddow's clarity of thought and incisive wit I chose a two minute segment of her show that night to summarize our country's situation. Have a look at it here:
Since that broadcast we have seen the same forces, like the Roger Ailes controlled parts of NewsCorp continue efforts to lure members of the GOP and the Conservative political movement back into that alternate reality. They are pushing really hard to keep the "Conservatives" inside their fictional universe. Every tactic is being employed by the "brains" like Karl Rove, and the "leaders" like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, seeking to prove that they were right, and the Liberals are all at fault. They are blaming everything they can think of, even the weather.
We need "real" Republicans to stand up and take back their party. We need them to yank it back out of the grasp of special interests, multinational corporations, extremists, and fools. I can only hope that the Republicans I have met, and those that I work alongside will step up and tell these pretenders like Limbaugh and Hannity to take a hike. The real people need to stand up, take a stand and declare that "the People are back in charge".
