Fact of the matter as a matter of fact

With everything that has happened, and is still happening, in and around this country over the past decade or so, it makes me wonder, what the heck is going on? Is there one thing that has brought us to this state of chaos, turmoil, and division?

I think that it is an accumulation of many different things over a very long period. It reminds me of that game some played as kids, and adults I guess, where one person tells another person something and then that person tells someone else, and so on. By the end of the chain of people, the story is nothing like the original one that was actually said. Things get twisted and some parts are downplayed, while others are made to sound way more exciting than it was. 

We used to be able to rely on the nightly news for all of the facts for everything going on in the world. Nowadays it depends on which side of the aisle that station is affiliated with. They don’t give the facts, they give their sides twisted facts to fit their agenda, and that goes for both sides.

Nowhere on TV is there one straight-down-the-middle news station that only gives just the facts and will let us, as human beings, think for ourselves and make our own decisions as to whether we agree or disagree with whatever the subject is. Nobody comes on anymore and says, here’s what happened, this is what was said, this is what was done. Then we, as intelligent humans, could decide if that’s a great thing, or if that’s a horrible idea, or even if we were to think that we need to hear a little more information on that subject before we were to form an opinion. 

Now we are told this is what has happened, this is what was done, and this is why you should hate or love this. The media has gone from an information business to a conclusion business. 

We, as a whole, of (mostly) intelligent people, seem to have lost the need to hear the facts and lost our ability to draw our own conclusions. Or, if you would like to flip that, we have lost the ability to hear the facts and lost the need to draw our own conclusions. 

It is in these times that I am not sure what we can do anymore. The media is running the government, the government is running the media, and we are stuck in the middle of it. 

I do know that I refuse to listen to just one side. Just one channel if you like. I still try to weed out the facts and make my own decisions on that. I won’t “drink the kool-aid” and believe what I am told to believe. I refuse to be a “sheep” of one side or the other.

In these days of chaos that we are in, I wish one of my favorite comedians of all time were still alive. George Carlin would be having a ball with everything, Republican/Democrat, mask/no mask, open border/wall. I’m pretty sure he would have enough material to do a special every week! 

I will leave you with a quote from George Carlin in one of his last specials before he passed away in 2008.

“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that have long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the statehouses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of thinking for themselves. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.”