The Root of All Evil

I will not lament on the fact that for us in the middle the loss of the democratic party has become a political challenge. I’ve done this elsewhere. What I would like to address is evil. I can see by various posts and protests that Bush is evil, Hillary is evil and regardless to who will redecorate the oval office, a lot of the world has decided we are evil.

We are also fat, stupid and ruled by CNN directives beamed to our couches and polled via our phones. Oh and we are racist nazi’s reliving the 1930’s of Germany stirred up by the Kos's and Malkin’s of the internet. I will agree we are a fucked-up bunch.

However, regardless to people like Whoppi Goldberg I don’t think we are less free than when we were children. I saw a restroom marked “colored” when I was nine, heard the news of troops being called to Little Rock to allow a young girl to attend class at eleven, and voted next to a Blackman when I was twenty-one. I do wonder what basis was behind Goldberg’s statement, for perhaps in it, I’d find the root of all evil.

Now I’ve yet to see elections called off, camps set up for dissidents or even a huge Reichsparteitage other than those held by Dean in which he will promise the gates of heaven in return for a vote, perhaps Howard could provide a clue to the root of all evil. Maybe, I’m putting too much into the words of others, those often repeated talking points that provide "in your face, sucker" punditry and claim to hold a Nostradamus like wisdom on the pathways to the future. Perhaps, evil like the word nazi has just become a term of disagreement, used by those either to dull or lazy to practice the noble art of rational discourse and accept the fact that in any democracy we all hold the right to disagree.

In the middle like most, I search for the answer to the balance the extreme, validate the claims made and often come up disenchanted, disfranchised and disconnected from what once was called the greatest experiment in democracy. Has it gone wrong, and if so who can we blame? Bush, Hillary maybe Nixon or heaven forbid, perhaps ourselves? Maybe words should hold more weight, perhaps talking points should be returned to the Madison Ave folks and instead of funding our memes with cash and pop polls, we fund them with educated opinion, experience and common good.

Perhaps the root of all evil is the lazy way we’ve come to use words like it.