Mar 10
19
Here is Some Stuff That’s Bugging Me
I’ve been trying to avoid politics for a while now, because it makes me hateful. The last thing I need is (yet another) excuse to indulge my misanthropy and wallow around loathing my fellow man, but here we go.
(It’s probably best that I’m writing this during Lent; if I hadn’t sworn off cursing, this post would blister the LCD crystals in your monitor.)
Fill out your census forms.
Really.
It’s not that big a deal.
The comments on the local paper’s website are just saturated with the soupy whistlings of mouth-breathing morons who are either squealing about how they’re not giving any information beyond “the number of people in the household” or are all swolled-up with pride over refusing to take part in the census at all.
Being all twisted up about the census is silly. It’s embarrassing that my fellow citizens will whine about how government is ineffective, and then mince around being ridiculously proud of themselves for corrupting the information the government needs to make decisions. Lack of trust in the government is a vicious circle: when people don’t trust the government, they do stupid things that disrupt the government’s ability to function, which provides them reason to distrust the government. It’s a cycle made worse by a political faction that actively profits from sowing distrust and sabotaging the government’s effectiveness.
There is a vast difference between arguing that your opponent will use the government to do something unwise and arguing that citizens should not trust the government at all. From the endless puling about “activist judges” to the constant harping on the Post Office not making a profit, what we are seeing now is not the normal back-and-forth of an adversarial political system. It is one faction seeking to gain advantage by wreaking havoc on the system itself. Example: Michelle Bachmann, who is just absolutely batcrap crazy, is telling people not to pay their taxes if the healthcare bill passes. Pro-tip: when a sitting member of Congress is telling people to break the law, your side has officially gone off the rails.
The people trying to win by destroying the mechanism of the government itself are no better than that dippy kid in your art class who wore Che t-shirts and went to detention for drawing an anarchy symbol on his desk. Anarchy sucks. Government is a good thing. We have spent millennia carefully crafting and refining the system of laws and government and structure that America uses to provide order to our society, to allow it to function in such a way that we get our food at Wal-Mart rather than hacking off someone’s head with a rusty meat cleaver and taking it from his hut, Mad-Max style. For the love of God, quit weakening the foundations of a pretty good government just so you can keep having lobster dinners with insurance industry lobbyists, you evil, sick, haggard wretches…
Yeah. That’s why I don’t do politics anymore.
Fill out your census forms.
