The Orange Chimera

Of course we have to talk about what’s happening to America in this current presidential election cycle. And it’s not unfathomable. (That doesn’t mean I support him—orange is not my new black.)
When you don’t give people what they want, when you give them a government that doesn’t govern, when you give them a political landscape where the two major parties are as far apart as the chasms of the Grand Canyon and refuse to bridge the gap, when people can’t rely on their elected officials to help them in their daily lives (despite the taxes they pay) but have to cope alone with concerns about their health (Flint, Michigan, where politicians, simply, were trying to shave money at the expense of their own people and are now busy covering their ass; or the continuing health care debate, where the richest country in the world is still debating over whether it should insure its own people, a right afforded to its citizens by some Third World countries); when the best and the brightest policy makers (with impressive Ivy League degrees and an iPad attached to their wrists) can’t figure out how to help people keep their jobs– trickle-down economics or trickle-up—which is it?; when you pontificate on every world crisis but have no definite policy and your lines in the sand are nothing more than shifting sands on Russia, Syria, ISIS, the doughy antics of North Korea’s eternally-prepubescent crown prince—except he keeps hundreds of thousands of his own helpless people in perpetuity in gulags and one of these days might launch one of those missiles—when your politics can’t provide answers and can only provide noise this is what you get: you get the proverbial man on the white horse who’s supposed to ride into town to cut through the brambles of the political system and chart a firm course for the welfare of the people.

You might get a Cincinnatus. You might get a Plastiras. Or you might get a reality show host with a bad spray tan and hair like a celestial Elvis who can’t distinguish reality from a reality show and espouses hate and bigotry as his rallying cry.

People will flock to extremists because they make their intentions clear from the start (their main appeal) and the followers of extremists make the most noise about their candidate so their candidate in this age of viral media gets the most attention.

But in the general election it’s about time reasonable people step up and make sure the process comes back to its senses and that we take responsibility for this process and the government that we elect into office. Let’s not get suckered into partisan politics so virulent that we paralyze the government and drive this presidential election into the perfect storm that it has become.