I guess the thing that bothers me the most, and that’s at the core of all the points I’ve made, is that I see more and more people eschewing reason in favor of fear, trading thinking for feeling. In so many of the important issues facing our nation and its future, the dialogue is centered around a childlike dread of the unknown. We’ve been told so many times over the last 8 years that the world is a scary place, and that we should hole up inside ourselves and be afraid. Don’t end the war in Iraq, because then our enemies will become emboldened and attack. Don’t change the tax system, because it will hurt the rich, and if we piss them off they’ll take it out on the poor. Don’t take our guns, because then we’ll become helpless victims of crime and an oppressive, totalitarian government. Don’t mess with free markets, because anything different than the current system will turn us into North Korea.

I completely agree that the media, regardless of political affiliation, is a big reason we see the world this way. Scary news sells, and it’s mostly the bad stuff that gets reported.

So I’ll accept the critique that the above points are, at best, a little disorganized. They were meant to be a collection of random thoughts about the assumptions we make in our political discourse, not necessarily a unified treatise on America. I DO take issue with the notion that they’re half-truths… I can support the arguments I’ve made every bit as well as anyone can attack them. They might be arguable points, but half-truths is going a bit far. They’re assertions, and I can’t prove them any more than anyone can disprove them. That’s just the nature of discussions like this.

And I really don’t mean to bash people with conservative views, in general. I know a lot of those points were thinly-veiled attacks on the McCain campaign’s talking points, and I won’t try to hide from that. What I DO think is that conservatives in America deserve better than the people who’ve represented them for the past 8 years. There are a lot of conservative viewpoints that I agree with, and I just wish that the Republican party could come up with someone better to espouse those views. Government, in general, is too big, and taxes, in general, are too high. But the GOP doesn’t represent small government anymore. Instead, I just see everything being reduced down to “vote for me because the other guy is the boogeyman.” The GOP, and indeed the country, deserves better than that.

Which brings me back to point #1, an idea that should have been the organizing thread through this whole discussion. What I see happening in the national conversation is, at its core, a culture war. A war for how America is to be defined. On the one side, you have people who think rationally about the problems we face, perhaps to a fault, and believe that ingenuity and innovation can fix the problems we have. On the other side, you have people who seem to reject the idea of IDEAS, content instead with dogma, feelings, and tradition – people who mistrust ideas in general as elitist, and who are offended and angered when their viewpoints are attacked (witness that Obama’s “professorial” demeanor is panned by pundits). THAT’s the thing I fear, and that I think we need to fight. We can’t talk intelligently about the problems we face if an increasing number of people are content to be ignorant. We have to stop reducing our politics to fear and slogans, and start using our heads again. All I was trying to do was undermine some fear-based assumptions that poison our discourse, so that we could all get back to debating things on their merits – as adults, and not as scared children.

America is certainly facing challenges right now – we always will. But guess what? The rich have never been richer and the poor have never had so much help … even as we deal with a volatile economy. Yet some people still have to blame others for their own personal circumstances and bash people with conservative views.

It’s amazing how negatively people see the country even when their lives have been so good. Yes, we need to change some important things, but remember just how much everything is mis-reported on all sides in today’s media.

Doug, I dig your fuck-em and think-out-side-the-box persona when it comes to your journey in the photography industry. It’s refreshing and inspires creativity. However, your political views seems more like a new group of photoshop actions still being sorted out.

-G

dav.d

sam