PrintFebruary 18, 2007
Playground Politics
When I was still young, I believed that I belonged to the best generation ever to grace Planet Earth. We were the boomers! We invented the Generation Gap with a form of mass rebellion that, even in our teens, was beginning to reshape America around whatever happened to catch on as our latest whim. New products were invented as quickly as we made a desire known. Back then most of us boomers thought all the attention was due to our genius. Now we know it was only due to our numbers.
Most of us, however, finally settled down, got married, raised families and matured. The rest went into politics. And now these still-adolescent, older boomers are running the country, shouting from coast to coast, filling our airwaves and our newspapers with something that more closely resembles verbal diarrhea than any sort of statesmanship. This country has never witnessed a more massive wave of behavioral incontinence than what we see today in our politics.
The only thing that it reminds me of is the old playground, where one bunch is yelling, "she has cooties" and the other bunch is running to tattle to the teacher. Only problem is that there are no teachers. We're running the playground too! As a nation, we have become like the family that gives control to the kid that throws the loudest tantrum. If only we could get these kids in power to just hold their breaths instead of screaming, we might actually get somewhere.
I still remember the day when you picked up a major newspaper and read real news, reported in a flat, only-the-facts-ma'am format. Now that we Boomers are in power, though, America is treated to whole "news" stories that revolve around, not an event, but a he-said-she-said tattling session. Our newspaper reporters have become "hall monitors," who wait with baited breath for the next verbal infraction of a code that seems to change from day to day and which only they understand.
Our election campaigns for President of the United States now more closely resemble those idiotic class officer contests we had in high school than the issues-driven campaigns of the past. Nowadays, if it won't look good on a campaign button or sound catchy in a 2-second verbal blip, forget it. I have never seen such obvious pandering to get elected. It reminds me of the girl who promised pizza every day in the lunchroom so she could be class president. Or the kid with a rich father who gave out snazzy ballpoint pens in exchange for a vote. In high school, though, the principal and the teachers still ran the school. The class officers could recommend, but they had no power to enact their wacky ideas. Now they do, ‘cause they're running the government.
And now that we have the Pelosi Pack in charge of Congress, just wait, because things are going to get a whole lot worse. (Hold on guys, it's not because she's a woman. We all know that there are indeed some very capable women in the world; they're just not Democrats for the most part.) But this particular woman seems to be every negative thing about the female human nature all rolled up into one overbearing princess who just cannot wait to bang her little gavel and wail for attention.
Well, now she has our attention and what does she do with it? She screams, "No fair! No fair!" every time someone disagrees with her and she says it's because she is a girl. She parades her grandchildren on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as though that's supposed to give real weight to her authority. If any man did that, he would be laughed out of the country. But no one is laughing - at least not in public - because they all know the kind of female fit that would ensue from her and her princess minions.
Just take this meaningless Iraq disapproval resolution. She acts as though we just went over to play a game of tag with a naughty Saddam, and now that we caught him - and even killed him to boot - it's time to leave their playground and come home for a kool-aid break. And that big, bad bully, G. W. Bush, won't let us. So, let's throw a big public pout to let the whole world know that W is a bully, and we're too scared that he will call us nasty names if we really take him on and cut off the money. He might say that we're not patriotic, or that we're cowards. "No fair! No fair!" That old sticks-and-stones thing really isn't true, because those words do hurt. Little Nancy thinks they would hurt so bad she just couldn't stand it. So, she'll just pout until she gets her way.
But at least W is still in charge, and he does evidence a bit more maturity. So far, at least, he hasn't sunk often to the playground level. Maybe it's because he has actually had to face real personal problems and resolve them without resorting to temper tantrums. Maybe it's because he is married to a real woman, who knows where to draw the line and make real demands on a real husband. Or maybe it's just because he was forced to actually grow up -- instead of remaining a forever flower child, going from playground to playground, protest to protest, making a whole lot of noise without ever accomplishing a darned thing that could actually be called progress.
I hope that the younger generations X, Y and whatever, have learned from our generation - the one that kept the dirty bath water and threw out the baby instead - that the old American way of sturdy individualism, moral integrity, and respect for God and country really is worth saving. Because there's a big war on and if these generations continue down the path we have blazed, then their children will be bowing to Allah 5 times a day with their little GPS's pointed to Mecca.
