Stitching together the left and right…….
A-bloggity-bloggity-blog-blog-blog….bloggity-blog-blog-bloggity….blog-blog-blog-bloggity…..Was going to write the whole blog in Morse Code but decided against it – mainly because I don’t know Morse Code……dropped out of Boy Scouts during knot-tying and didn’t make it to Morse Code….could have been a secret agent except for that simple action…I mean, if you can tie a good knot and you know Morse Code, you got a good head start on the rest of the spies.
So, if you wanna know when the great political divide started – at least in North America – you have to look no further than when something called Fox News went on the air….because from that day forward, the political right and the political left and everybody in the middle started to fall under the sway of their own particular source of news…..conservative folks generally started to watch Fox News for their TV news and the so-called liberals and people left-of-centre watched and continue to watch everything else….
Because while a lot of right-leaning folks watch a steady diet of Fox – I only know this anecdotely but am fairly confident it’s true – most of the rest of society gathers its news from a relatively broad spectrum of sources…..pretty well all other sources – except perhaps Fox….the conservative folks don’t generally watch this other broad spectrum of sources because they’ve come to believe it’s “fake” news or somehow untrue….Even though the liberal philosophy has given us pretty well everything positive in our societies, a whole bunch of conservatives seem to think that liberals eat babies, are involved in human trafficking and are responsible for nearly every evil action on the planet.
Whenever I get into any type of discussion with people of the conservative persuasion these days, I always ask them the same question….I say to them that modern liberalism has given our societies old age pension, unemployment insurance, universal health care, health and safety legislation, disability insurance, social assistance, environmental protections……what, on the other hand, has modern conservatism given us….name one thing – I’ll give you the last 300 years – name one thing!
In fact, I’ve come to believe that if we could somehow rid the world – the entire planet – of all modern conservative values that we would in short order be feeding everyone on the planet – there would be health care around the world – and there would be some basic standard of living on earth. For every step that liberalism takes to move us forward, conservatism takes us two steps back. It holds us back….it punishes the poor and downcast for who they are and where they were born.
No, I used to believe we needed some type of balance in our societies - that there needed to be a right and a left….but I also believed that there was some way for them to work together for the overall betterment of humankind and planet earth. I no longer believe that. I now believe that there is no real way to get the two sides working together so we can move forward and make this a good place for all to live.
And I’m pretty sure it all started with the launch of Fox News….the polarization of society has, of course, been greatly accelerated by social media which uses something called algorithms on all of its platforms….these non-human, cyber organisms further divide us by making sure we mostly only see the opinions of the people we agree with – and we grow wary of any other point of view…
But there’s no going back….so we have to find a way ahead. We need to somehow stitch together left and right into one piece of cloth….we really need one giant re-boot….we need to somehow start over….we need to forget the past when nearly every ethnic group on the planet has been abused and damaged in one way or another. We need to move forward worrying about the good of all and the betterment of everyone….no one should be left behind.
“Hew to the line; let the chips fall where they may…..”