Rhymes with schmolotics

I typically stay away from political discourse here, a long-term decision with which I've been quite satisfied. Since the subhead of the blog's title is, "If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself," that pretty much excludes politics, which are are abut as far from that principle as you can get at the moment.

Every day I see articles about Obama or Romney said, confirmed, denied, restated or spun some issue or another. I see them, though I never read them. Why? Well, why would I read them? To what purpose? Am I trying to choose a candidate? No, there's a pretty clear choice. It's almost shocking to me that there are any undecided voters, though since being undecided at this point is a sign of intellectual laziness, I guess that's kind of my point. The whole dialogue is just plain dumb. And it's our fault, and it's emblematic of what's wrong with the country.

For me, my most frequently observed human failure is the inability to listen. Listening is far more that waiting quietly until the other people have stopped talking; it means taking in and thinking about what the other person is saying, apart from your feelings on the matter. Wait, don't our own feelings matter? Of course they do, but the other person in the conversation has their own feelings as well, and it's those feelings that they're talking about, not yours. You'll have plenty of time to apply your own feelings after you've considered those of others.

At the moment, there is no listening in American politics. In fact, there's not even agreement on even the most rudimentary set of facts. Evolution? Climate change? The appropriate balance between public and private sectors? The rights of the poor? There's no agreement as to whether any of these things even exist, primarily because Republicans deny virtually everything science-based and don't believe there should be any public sector jobs (except for their own, of course). And there are only poor people because they are somehow unworthy of being otherwise.

It's really more systematic than that. The most telling slogan of the health care debate was something to the effect of "Get your government hands off my Medicare." Because Republicans see no value in a federal government (except for the parts they control), there can be no honest debate on what the proper role of that government should be. Cut my taxes! Yeah! But make sure you fill the potholes and clean the streets and have police and firefighters when I need them. It's nonsense.

OK, this has turned into somewhat of a rant, so I'll stop here. Maybe I'll come up with something more fulfilling later.