I Can’t Take it Anymore

This country used to be great, and it still is, but there is so much partisan bs that we don’t do anything but fight. We say we are tired of it, yet we STILL allow it to go on, we participate in it too, don’t be fooled. We want all the bs to stop, but we want the other side to magically come to our side. In fact, what we REALLY want is for them to suddenly sit up, open their eyes and yell loudly “I can’t believe how stupid I was!!!” Then proceed to tell everyone who thought that way how stupid they are. We used to agree to disagree and move on about our way, but insecurities got the better of us and we stopped. We needed everyone to agree with us and thus began the spread of false information. This conveniently came about the time the Internet started to take off. No one stopped anyone either, claiming its not seditious libel because it’s classified as entertainment or satire, but in reality, it IS sedition. We started spreading fear and propaganda over facts, then we created fake news sites to make our claims seem legit. And the saddest part of all…. The masses followed. They not only believed it, they spread it. Soon we have Facebook and now, that cheerleader from high school read an article somewhere that said Michele Obama gave Texas to China, and now she has proof! It’s on the Internet, and they can’t put anything on the Internet that isn’t true! Now we have slinging “news” articles back and forth and people ending friendships over things that are not even true and our country is getting ripped to shreds. I can spot a fake news story a mile away and while I love a good “stupid criminal” fake story, the dangerous ones are the ones people believe. 

“But there was a video!”, “I saw a picture!!” Yes, and I can make pictures like that too, I know of at least thirty people who can also fake a picture and video. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Otherwise intelligent people reading something from a “news site” that they read all the time so it HAS to be true. Here is an idea, don’t believe all the “the media doesn’t want you to see this” because the media saw it, investigated it, and found it to be false. There are also places like Snopes and the good old fashioned AP where you can pretty much verify what you read. 

I propose this…. Instead of finger pointing, name calling, and believing all the false crap that we read, let’s step back…. Try to see where these are coming from and WHY they are printing them. What is in it for the publication? Then, maybe, just maybe, we can stop losing friendships that we’ve had forever, we can still look at each other as the people we’ve known forever and not some “heartless monster”, “sheep”, or “bleeding heart”. 

Neither side is perfect, and neither side is 100% right, but what made this country special was our ability to have two opposing views come together and make something that works. We have been reduced to the country equivalent of The View.