We love Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert at our house here on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, which is, in general, a pretty sane place to live. I was surprized to hear that their shows attract primarily young people because I think biting political satire is funny no matter ones age. Saturday was a work day for me so I didn’t see the live TV coverage of the Washington D.C. Rally for Sanity and/or Fear but I have seen lots of video clips and newspaper articles about the Rally, which apparently had about a 200,000 strong turnout. Some funny, funny stuff but sobering too. And I really loved a lot of the many different homemade signs that people brought to the Rally. ( The Washington Post has a photo gallery submitted by readers of some of the insightful and funny signs seen at the Rally.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/10/25/GA2010102501514.html .)
We don’t usually deal with politics on this Blog but I think political sanity is fair game. From a political point of view, I am an Independent. I’m not registered with any political party, vote after evaluating the candidates and over the course of my years have voted for Republicans, Democrats and Independents. But I am a big, big believer in civil discourse and behavior so the rise of the rhetoric of violence and the talk of “second amendment remedies” and behavior of the last few months seems unnecessary and alarming to me. I believe President Obama was born in Hawaii, I don’t believe President Obama is a Nazi or a Socialist, I don’t believe in handcuffing a reporter for asking a question and the mere idea of stomping on the head of a protester, female or male is absolutely abhorrent to me. That’s what the Red Shirts and Green Shirts do in Thailand, that’s not supposed to happen here in the good ole U. S. of A.
If I hear one more politician condemn TARP as wrong and unnecessary I’m just going to ……. well, do something. As a realtor I deal with banks and bankers everyday so I’m really familiar with how the whole world runs on credit , from big companies to small farmers borrowing for seed and fertilizer for the new crop, to individual house holds, credit is essential. So I so well remember the days after the September, 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse, when credit was simply frozen and governments world- wide were worried about the melt-down of the world financial system. Saying to the banks, ” hey guys, it’s all your fault, suck it up, too bad for all of you, down the tubes you go, adios forever” could have been a whole lot of fun but I’ve never been a believer in self destruction just to get back at the other guy. So TARP was necessary, in my opinion, unless we just wanted to cut off our head to spite our nose, Alice In Wonderland style. And the good news is that most of the banks that got TARP funds have repaid the principal plus some hefty interest so we the people will have doubled down on our benefits—- we saved our financial system and made money doing it. How great is that ! So instead of being in line for free soup most of us are on-line, thinking about the new iPad or the new 4G EVO, or Christmas or some other such thing, the whole point being that most of us are still living our lives, albeit on a more frugal basis, but we are not struggling through another Great Depression. So to hear politicians on both sides of the aisle reviled for passing the legislation that kept our financial system from total collapse just annoys the you-know-what out of me !
Which is why I really, really needed some Jon Stewart Sanity just before these elections. I’m not and don’t want to become a person who turns purple in the face and yells or strikes out at other people about differences in political opinion. I want to continue being a person who can, pretty calmly, make my points, hoping that the other person is trying to keep an open mind and is actually considering what I’m saying, and no name calling, please. And I hope to be able to do rationally consider their points in return. And Jon, I agree completely with you that ” these are hard times but not the end times”. So let’s just keep calm and carry on like the real Americans that we all are. As Rosie the Riveter famously said, “We Can Do It.”
