Control
“We are out of control and spinning toward the bottom”, quipped one political observer recently. The pandemic is out of control because of our inability to require vaccinations and mask wearing when appropriate. We have adopted a mish- mash of regulations and non regulations that have only served to confuse the situation, and the non vaccinated are dying by the thousands.
Our extreme weather events have grown much more frequent due to global warming. Crime and gun violence is rampant in our major cities,. Our foreign policy seems to be equally at odds with our aims . Our withdrawal from Afghanistan, while welcome, was messy and mercurial, leaving many, including our friends and supporters in the lurch. So where do we go from here? And how do we get there?
In unity there is strength. But we have to find that unity to enhance our strength. How do we do that? Embrace truth . Acknowledge the facts, and go from there. While that should be simple, it is unfortunately quite complicated . Upwards of a third of our citizenry have bought into the “ Big Lie”. Our former President continues to invent and foment various versions of the “ I didn’t lose the election. It was stolen from me “ theme. His Republican colleagues have been complicit in perpetuating “ The Big lie” by not calling him out on it, and they all know better. Nearly 100 different judges, many of them Republican, have ruled that there was no massive fraud in the election, as Trump contends. And a recent memo uncovered by the NY Times shows that his own campaign staff had debunked those claims, even as Rudy Guiliani and others continued to publicly proclaim
What Trump’s staff knew was a lie. That kind of bold mendacity should be a disqualifying factor by any standard. There comes a time when truth matters and that time has long since passed.
The major purveyor is disinformation on the question of the validity of the 2020 election has been Fox News, which is owned by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch. If Murdoch were to stand up for truth instead of profit, we could all move forward in a major way. Perhaps a boycott of all things Murdoch is in order . Hitting him in the pocketbook would probably be more effective than hitting him on the head. Advertisers could pull their ads from Fox News and the Wall St. Journal, for starters. Subscriptions to the Wall St. Journal could be cancelled, and TV’s showing Fox News in the gym and other places could be switched to another channel.
Rupert Murdoch’s insinuation of himself into our governmental process with his kind of hand crafted news has been insidious, and needs to stop. We need to recover and uncover the truth, and then we can unify and move forward. In the end, it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which shall set us free.
