Which Way Do You Swing? - Politics

Most conservative policies seem to help big business and entrepreneurs by extending tax breaks, incentives and reducing red-tape. These policies assist those already managing.  Sometimes by a little, sometimes a lot. It is the politics and policies of capitalism that fuel the age of the billionaires, and the promise that everyone can achieve those heights. 

These same policies tend to leave those not managing untouched, or, on occasion, worse off, usually in real terms across time, making it harder to quantify any direct disadvantage from an individual policy.

These are policies promoted as celebrating success and allowing the 'job-makers' to take advantage of the system, up to and including, rorting that system. Success and financial power seem to make all these indiscretions tolerable.  

The left finds these greedy, grifting, profiteering examples intolerable and they shout about them as if these are the only examples that exist. They are not. These policies help and support some truly deserving business models, across the economic spectrum, to survive and thrive.

The progressive left puts forward policies that reduce the ability of the successful to make higher profits and placing more restrictions and oversight on businesses. This makes the difficult early years of small business and small sole traders even more precarious. The left also seeks a basic minimum standard of living for all, universal health care, they look to environmental issues at the expense of corporate profits and ensure those on the lowest rungs of society can maintain an equitable standard of living.

These policies are designed to raise the greatest number possible out of poverty and ensure that working full time is rewarded with a liveable wage that covers life's basics and provides for a family. This also allows some to choose not to work and live solely off welfare. 

The right finds these greedy, grifting, freeloading examples intolerable and they shout about them as if these are the only examples that exist. They are not. These policies help and support some truly deserving individuals being let down by a system purported to be looking out for everyone.

I've always felt things work best when liberals and conservatives exchange power at around a 2 to 3 ratio. The right builds up the wealth with a strong economy and the left reforms social policies to help those who slip through the net of the conservative economic lift.

The ratio has slipped across the world because the right has outplayed the left at politics. This has happened because the left regard morality in politics as a badge of honour, and the right has long ago recognised that badges are worthless. 

Once morals counted for something in life and in politics, but then came the age of spin where both side's spokespeople focused only on the faults of the other side, and never with themselves. Where no mistake is owned or corrected and doing the right thing, a standard that was once the default, or at least the desired position, is now the exception.

How did we get here? 

It began when those charged with holding leaders responsible, the fourth estate, the news journalists, became confused with being personalities and entertainers. 

When equal representation of both points of view became more important than facts as determined and checked by multiple sources by professionally trained, skilled and schooled journalists whose reputations depended on their accuracy, facts became irrelevant.

When the politically correct ideal of regarding every view as relevant and worth scrutiny on official news broadcasts became a benchmark, this worthy notion was exploited by those looking to hide issues, spin alternative facts and obfuscate truths. You can shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and get away with it provided you do something provocative enough to misdirect people from your crime. Throw in some 'what-about-ism', cloud the facts with suggestions the victim had a gun or a record, and alert the press that many other people shot people on the same day, and your crime will hardly rate a mention. 

When the opinion/editorial/op-ed piece began to be presented alongside news with little or no delineation, news reporting stopped being news and became political propaganda. The ultimate extension of this is the dedicated partisan network that says whatever is needed by the government to convince people it's news. It is believed for no other reason than it looks like a news channel.

The multiplatform social media landscape has allowed every opinion to be a truth as the presenter presents it. All too often the term 'do your own research', a term intended to mitigate legal issues over commentary of stocks and investments has permeated into every opinion put forward as a phrase to legitimise that opinion by alerting you to the existence of any number of 'opinions' online that back up the opinion being put forward. 'Do your own research' now means, go and read equally dubious opinion pieces posted online by others who share my views.

If you see spokes-people introduced from two sides of politics or from two sides of a contentious issue, what is the point of staying to watch? Professional press agents now spruik their well-rehearsed talking points without ever listening to the other side, and those talking points are always extreme examples. For their team, they put forward positive outliers, for the other side, the negative outliers, and each example gets promoted as examples of the norm - which they are definitely not.  

Politics has stopped being an avenue of service to do the greater good and is now an avenue to get what lobbyists want and stop the will of the people from participating. Journalists began this slide into the darkness of opinions based on wants instead of facts, and the internet has sped it up and made us all contribute to the demise of facts.

How many false stories have been reposted on scientific, medical, political and even current events?

   

What happened to common sense and genuinely doing your own research? Question opinions by seeking out multiple sources of facts as published by respected and accredited institutions and experts with current accredited standing. I want to hear other people's opinions, but I want to know they've taken some time and given some effort towards forming them. Reading a headline and reposting something without scrutiny becomes a waste of everyone's time, or worse, another nail in the coffin of our entire democratic system.

Hasan Minhaj in his address at the correspondent's dinner said: "I don't have a solution of how to win back trust, but I know in the age of Trump, you guys (the media) have to be more perfect than ever because you are how the President gets his news - not from advisors, not from experts, not from intelligent agencies - you guys. So that's why you've got to be twice as good, you've got to be on your A-game, you can't make any mistakes, because when one of you messes up - he blames your entire group; and now you know what it feels like to be a minority." 

In the dawning age of conspiracy, where friends and family regularly state alternative facts as truth, and when challenged, remain defiant and tell you to do your own research, clear thinking, factual journalism and finding alternative sources to double-check alternative facts seems to have become the individual's job. The news media has become entertainment. Politicians have become infallible. Special interest groups have become public relations spokes-people, and facts have become subjective, to be massaged, manipulated, and misrepresented as the truth. 

George Orwell saw this future in a misdirected democracy that delivered authoritarianism. His chilling dystopian tale is starting to feel all too real - the only thing George got wrong was the date.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

"How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."

"Sometimes, two and two are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once."

― George Orwell, 1984

The Plague That Dare Not Speak its Name.

 The Plague That Dare Not Speak its Name.

by Scott Norton Taylor. 

Four decades of tomorrows past, a fearful breeze blew in a plague, a pandemic, an intimate kiss that outed those it touched through death.

You saw the numbers frail.

You saw the body count as brothers, cousins, sons; of fathers, uncles, friends and foe alike, all coming out in failing health, with diagnosis reluctantly revealed, exposing private lives.

The stereotypes long ridiculed and held as ‘them’, not us, swiftly dropped as every kind; every colour, creed and embodiment of manly type. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, the mechanic and the cook, lined up with athletes, artists and celebrities, not one exception, not one variety unseen. Artists known and yet to make their mark: of fashion and of film, from ballet or with brush, young and old, the powerful and poor, lining up to queue towards an uninviting end.

All were seen for who they were, as whole, their entire lives revealed, chased by shame and reputations stained, as tightly sealed glass panes to lives were finally pried ajar, though friends and family quickly came to claim, their loved one’s inclusion a mistake, that window led to somewhere else afar.

Remember the boy, not yet a man, in gown and metal bed, who, at twenty-one, mistakes his nurse for mother, “I knew you’d come,” he said. But she would never come for shame and pain, and disapproval ruled her world and outshone even son.

To the young man watching friends ahead all leave; his future seen. He closed his door, with scared and lonely click to lock his tragedy away, but it escaped through quality of cuts and blade. Those who came to save a life, the holder never wanted saved, and fought against his screams that left him free to bleed, his work unfinished and undone. Convicted, tried and sent away for smearing, splattering, spraying his poison life on uniforms with lack of empathy for interruption done. Fuelled by media and lynch mob-like obsession – that lonely, desperate man spent his last days wasting in a prison.

At someone’s side, in near confusion, called to dance, marked by transfusion, a girlfriend, a wife or even newborn child, would all be vilified and shunned through ignorance towards such random chance.

The friends, who drifted quietly away, thought of infrequently, their fate and lives imagined, unrolling alongside. The unknown years, sometimes in decades glide, then shocked into reflection, a name in quilted letters found, their final autograph; few words, a date; the sum of one whole life. A flood of mournful thoughts of moments left untold, the nights of love and laughter and particular inflexions, yet, none of this is mentioned in that small, neat epitaph.

Those who flamed so bright within that overwhelming storm, their passing told of numbers unimagined, from every walk of life, from every nation born, and under every type of opaque veil. Their stories remain important, to speak, to remember, to mourn.

The green-eyed boy, with jet black hair, who fell unwell and came to tell at twenty-two of his return to boyhood home, to rest and mend; I never saw again.

My naïveté and nervous kiss of one so bright and full of life who took such care not to spread his despair, but never told of what he held within, for fear he’d never hold or love again.

At twenty-four, the call received from one so briefly known to warn I should atone and seek a clearing sheet; the fear and prayers, and frantic calls to find out what to do. My childhood doctor beaming welcome to see me fully grown who showed me quickly out his door once request for such a test was known.

Of two who rang to say farewell, their antiviral joy no friend, the stigma and fear of drugs too dear, a system geared so lowest-ranked lose their will and quickly disappear. They were supposed to go and never cause a scene, behind the privacy of their closed door, a repeated drama, a million times before – but they refused to fade, and still remain, with help, to live and love again.

Did it really happen, with all those lives now gone?

A life that ends, to relatives and friends, it leaves a monumental cost.

When numbers grow beyond account of names, all humanity is lost.

Today’s same crowd unmarked, as large as that before, sent back to hide by subtle held decree; a duality of roles; of dual lives with wives, captive to declare they’re free.

More easily disguised, as privilege lives bark nuanced calls for all to fall in line with lifestyles based on prayer, sanctified in clever nuanced words that make it clear, their good-will’s not to share.

How did so much recent suffering, revealing so many lives that lived and loved in such a colourful array, not move us forward?

I am so tired of coming out, a thousand times already with no end in sight; on form with pen, at bank with application new, on phones with confusion first, then overly effusive apologetic nurse, administrator, manager or worse.

Those addresses matter; the he/him, she/her, the they/them of lines blurred. I’m glad you don’t get it, that’s easier for you, that your life is not so many times denied or multiplied in explanations new, but please, stop for a moment and consider how it feels to be an ‘other’, a misrepresented disrespected brother or sister, as someone misidentified.

Four decades of tomorrows past that fearful breeze, with its numbers of diversity, the regular and most unlikely, the many broken hearts torn prematurely apart, who showed so clear the numbers from homes and families, and yes, even in your sacred pews as they sought guidance despite your whispered views.

Have any yet heard the voice of faith proclaiming clear, the virtue of those who live and love with nothing to repent? They preach their words beside each fence, for in their eyes; the eyes of those of greatest faith, the fluid, non-conforming crowd are still not innocent.

How did the legacy of a missing rainbow crowd, robbed of choice to hide, have us slide back towards the shame and guilt that makes it brave to show one’s pride?

Why is bravery still needed to wake and go to work, or bravery to be yourself, or just to claim your place of those who did survive?

Today’s fresh deadly plague, a novel kiss at setting sun, has stopped the world, but that other breeze still blows, now hardly ever named.  

Does anyone believe that lost fateful generation, numbering in their millions, was some mere aberration from the norm? That this ‘next’ generation or the one ahead again will any less confront convention and embrace the fluid storm?

Do you want your children safe?

Can you not recall that recent chilling page?

Where is the bravery to call a plague a plague?

Where is that last vaccine, or better yet, a cure, brought on at pace?

Where is the research for the chronic medical embrace?

The managed threat ignored and tamed, the silent, hiding voice of leaders meek, bowing to power, without the lack of will or bravery to speak, perchance to dream of those now managed as an endless income stream.

Some have survived, with pointed, heavy nod to every soul that went before and led; equality remains ahead, a distant clear horizon at the tail of one almighty fearful storm.