This is EXACTLY how I feel about it all!

TELL THE TRUTH AND SHAME A POLITICIAN
by Stacie Adams

Right now I have the temperament of a perverted, overweight car salesman in church after spending the night prior knee deep in assorted whores. I am sweaty, panicked and waiting for the other shoe to drop right on my fucking head.

The reason I feel this way has nothing to do with my personal life, or anything untoward that’s happened to me. I’m just being infected by the tenor of society at the given moment. I’ve been trying to put it in words for some time, but surprisingly, words fail me when describing current events.

I just read something by the always awesome Stanley Crouch, wherein he quoted an African businesswoman as saying “The only foreign aide that we need right now is the truth". It was like throwing a light switch in my head. It sounds trite, but very little emphasis is put on telling the truth. I don’t even really speak of outright lies, but just the way things are described by and to the general public just smacks of dishonesty.

For instance, Barack Obama gets his health care reform passed, a bill that greatly resembled one floated by republicans years ago, and neither side gets it right. Liberals call it a stunning victory, conservatives call it then end of civilization as we know it, and a just smattering of people call it what it is; a watered down, big corporation funded and approved bill that garnered team Obama desperately needed political win. It will help a clutch of Americans receive healthcare at a cost to many others, but comes nowhere close to the lofty goal of universal coverage that was promised at the onset. There, was that so hard?

But instead of having a conversation centering on the fact that people wanted actual, legitimate political change and got none, we are stuck discussing a bunch of fanatical nonsense issuing from both sides.

Take Arizona’s recent decision to go fully wolf on illegal immigrants. It is easy to cluck your tongue at those awful racist rednecks and their Draconian laws, but not so to consider what it would be like to live in a border state with hundreds of thousands of illegals, with a good number carting around criminal records, in addition to bringing a raging drug war along with them in some cases.

The solution to the illegal immigration problem is quite easy; go after the businesses that employ illegal immigrants. Hit them hard enough, and you will remove the problem. But we can’t do that, we’ll piss off businessmen. OK, so let’s go about getting these illegal immigrants naturalized, so in the very least they will be on record and accounted for. Well, we can’t do that either because republicans will fall into a dead faint just after shouting ‘Amnesty!’

This is the result when you let the unhinged assholes take charge of the debate. Nothing ever gets solved. As a result of Arizona’s decision, they are going to set off a firestorm of litigation, which will defeat the entire purpose of their attempt at reigning in this problem.

If that doesn’t piss you off, this should. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will be retiring soon, giving Obama the opportunity to nominate a new judge for the position, and republicans are already threatening filibuster. They seem most concerned about abortion, the last thing on the minds of most Americans.

Do you know what would happen if they really went through with their filibuster threat? The already molasses-slow legal process would literally screech to a halt until Obama offered someone hick-friendly enough for the squeamish republicans. And this isn’t even the real issue, given the Supreme Court decided not so long ago in favor of corporations having the same rights (and in some cases, more rights) than people, which sets a disastrous precedent for terminally coddled corporate entities. But chances are you won’t hear a peep about that; it will all be about little Suzy and her love child that may or may not be the second coming of Christ or Martin Luther King, Jr. (or Richard Ramirez or John Wayne Gacy, but don’t tell her that).

Sometimes I feel like it's my job as a writer to offer solutions to these problems, like I'm leaving people high and dry if I don't afford some profundity that throws your switch, like the aforementioned quote from the business woman did for me. But how do you solve something so far reaching, so ingrained as this, that you can't even adequately describe it? How do you make people stop bullshitting you and just give it to you straight? Well, I have absolutely no idea. And unfortunately, that's how I must leave it.