Tired of Politics

I'm not quite sure where to start. It began for me a long time ago, this frustration when confronted with tirade after tirade from television "pundits". It continued when these same people's words began arriving in my email inbox. I bet you've received one. Or a thousand. The email is meant well, from a friend or neighbor with an entry line that reads something like, "Thought this was interesting." The following text usually includes a letter that's passed through about a hundred other email addresses and seems like it's written by a good American, but then somewhere you'll see the words of evil right or left wing talking heads. Sometimes the words are clearly shown to be from a particular person.

Election time was a fruitful time for these nasty missives, and for awhile I tried to fact check them and notify those who sent them to me of what was valid and what wasn't. But it wore me out and I decided to ignore them, figuring they'd go away after the election.

Anyway, I reached the critical mass with political words last week. It may have had something to do with the 100 soccer emails I had to read and write due to the abundance of rained out practices and games, and the clutter of junk in my inbox. My poor neighbor caught the worst of it, when I wrote her back saying I was happy to get her jokes and educational tidbits but could she please stop sending me political opinion pieces. What I wanted to say was "if I want to read Dick Morris' opinion I'll go look for it", but I tried to be kind. I do love my neighbor.

So several very quiet days went by. I feared I'd hurt her feelings. I debated whether I'd gone to far. Yesterday we spoke from one back deck to the other, and I got an earful of opinion, which is fine. Because it wasn't Dick Morris speaking to me.

And it's not just Dick Morris, it's also James Carville and a whole host of others. It just seems to me that so many of these people only get a paycheck if they are extreme; so extreme they are. I admit, I'd rather our government not have to do many of the things it is doing right now, but I don't think there is a lot of wiggle room for nipping this economic crisis in the bud. President Obama has barely been in office two months. Anyone saying ugly things about his policies already is clearly more focused on themselves than our country.

Tired of Politics © 2009
Janice Arrowood