Oxymorons of our day

I hear people complain about what they see as wrong with the world (I am amazed how much of this time is spent with the dog-and-pony show presented by the media), but the vast majority are not willing to actually DO anything, they would rather go hang with there friends at the club or watch TV until their brains turn into something with the consistency of tapioca.

If we continue our current path of apparently shortsighted and selfishness as a people, what does that say about us and where will it take us?  So I hereby place a few of the most obvious (to me at least) political/cultural oxymorons of our time;

1. How have we convinced people that their children do not need an education while at the same time discussing the dumbing down of the nation and its inability to raise children who cannot compete in the global marketplace?

   I hear people talking about the privatizing of basic social services, from schools to even police and fire departments. Should I be happy when I see a child carrying a textbook that is labelled as “sponsored by Company-X?” Can I count on it being accurate?

2. How was it that the poor and middle-classes have been convinced that any social safety-net should be done away with during a difficult economic time, but the mega-rich deserve to keep tax cuts that would have paid for it all, not new taxes but the expiration of a temporary easements, that’s why they were called “tax cuts” to begin with. Has anyone noticed the Reagan’s “Trickle Down Economics” seems to have been dammed somewhere between the mega-rich and the middle-class, not to mention the lower-class.
3. I remember being told that “Freedom of the Press” was what made us so much better than them, but the press in this country is no longer free, I would propose that it is currently less free in America than it was in the former Soviet Republic’s “Pravda“.

   In today’s United States, the slavery of the press is not to the government, but to the corporations that either own the media or pay for and extort the media through advertising.

4. When people think Rush Limbaugh is a reporter, he’s a political commentator (analyst at best) last time I checked, and Fox News actually compares itself to political satirists as proof of its validity to be claimed as news, (let’s not even discuss “fair and balanced”), what does it say about where we have gone as a nation?

This is by NO means a complete list of issues in this country, but it is a beginning, a place to begin.  The simple fact is that if you think things are bad now, without some course correction, it gets a lot worse.

The longer things are allowed to follow their current path, the harder it will be to not only actually institute change, but the barriers placed by those who have accumulated power will be all that much harder to remove.

So I will leave you with some favorite quotes from one of the Founding Fathers;

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Thomas Jefferson