A rare foray into politics

One of these days I'm going to talk about how great my life is these days, and all the fun adventures I've been on in between all these deep things I write about.

In the mean time, here's my recent facebook status, it turned out long, so I thought the blog would be a good place for it.

"These days I rarely throw my hat into the political arena, because it's messy, and crowded, and my hat would get stepped on and covered in junk.  I like my hat.

That said, I think it's disappointing and absurd that both sides are finding ways to blame each other for a shutdown that was caused by the complete failure of our government to do anything but bash heads against each other over partisan talking points.

I'm not saying both sides are equally at fault here; I am just over reading one sided articles taking quotes out of context and spinning fallacy filled vitriol to paint their opponents as terrible people who don't care about anyone.  Maybe if we as a society were capable of having a reasonable discussion about issues and understanding why people feel the way we do, value their opinions, and then come to a consensus which we all agreed to live by, we might have leaders who aspire to do the same.  If we demand it, they'll start selling it to us.  As it is we love the conflict, and so that sells papers and wins votes.

I think for the most part my friends on facebook are far more reasonable and mature than our leaders (which concerns me deeply), but I'd just request that people take a second before posting passionate opinion pieces that attack the opposition.  Maybe we ought to work on respecting people who disagree with us.  That could be fun.

Hopefully I'm just naive and the government has always been this immature and the populace always so uninformed and easily swayed by loud noises, and we still managed to get things done.  As it is, I'm more than a little concerned for the future.  We've already raped the world of its resources, the least we can do is maintain a functioning democracy and economy for the next generation or two to work with.

That's all, I'll go back to posting witty comments and pictures of my adventures."

So that's how I feel about this shutdown, and the general state of american politics.  Sometimes people assume I don't care much about politics, but that's not entirely true.  I avoid politics for the same reason I don't want to be an ecologist: It's not that I don't think it's important; I feel that to get involved would be to face a long disappointing battle against an undefined enemy that doesn't even recognize the casualties.  That's probably not the most noble of choices I've made, but there it is.