Just thinking about the talking heads on TV. You’ve got the sniggering, smirking auto-back-patters who are in love with their own political brilliance, and then the freakish ultracon ragers like Bill O’Reilly and his recent clones. Plus a news media that leaps into the fray only to blindly go along and parrot the words of both.
I was thinking about it, as I often do, in a visual metaphor.
Say you’ve got this nice, safe beach, a place you’ve been a thousand times before, and you know it’s completely safe. Ten-year-old you and your friends enter the water how? In a screaming, laughing, splashing blind rush.
But then say there’s this rocky thicket, a place you’ve never been before, with irregular jagged rocks sticking up out of the ground, thorny brambles scattered here and there, visible pits in the ground and musky, beastly whiffs on the breeze.
How do you go in there?
Carefully. Thoughtfully. Watchfully. Slowly.
So anytime a new issue comes along that needs to be discussed and explored in the public spotlight, an unknown subject fraught with hidden hazards, how should you approach it? In a screaming, laughing, splashing blind rush? Or in a careful, thoughtful, watchful, slow approach?
And that’s what I hate about the current political and media climate in America. The airwaves are packed with screamers and ragers.
The careful thinkers are nowhere to be heard … but even if they DID manage to get onscreen and begin to explore an issue slowly and carefully, the screamers would call them traitors and the media would turn away from them.
So we live with volume turned up on the screamers, volume turned down on the quiet voices.
And things get worse.