READY, SET, GO!

January 8, 2010

Here I go. I’ve never tried a blog before. My husband has and it’s quite good, but is mostly directed at friends and family, sharing tid bits and photos of our life, mainly our kids, and his interests and other things that fascinate him that he wants to share with others.

I, on the other hand, spend a lot of time writing e-mails to him about my frustration and concern about the way the country is headed under the leadership of this administration and Congress. My husband started to actually get concerned for me because world events were causing me so much stress, causing true anxiety.

He suggested I funnel my thoughts and analysis through an anonymous blog. Anonymous, so that I don’t hold back my true thoughts because of fears of offending any friends or family that might read it.

That feeling, itself, is part of my frustration with the times. As a society, we worry so much about offending one another that we’re often unwilling (myself included) to talk, discuss, and/or debate about our different worldviews. It’s easy, and often times fun, to discuss our thoughts about the important things like religion and politics with those who agree with us.

I think that is why we see such a proliferation of politically oriented blogs. It’s a chance to vent to people who think like yourself. And, occasionally, you know your voice is being heard by people with opposite viewpoints, without having the confrontation face to face.

That’s why I am drawn to Instapundit.com. It sends me to links that affirm my beliefs, as well as sometimes offering the alternate point of view in some of the links, but mainly in the comments. Every so often, I try to find a left leaning blog or news organization to get a feel for the opposite arguments, but I feel most comfortable reading links and/or watching news that sympathize with my own frustration with the temper of the world right now, particularly in politics, but also in many cultural issues, as well. I don’t think I’m alone in that. There is definitely an us and them mentality out there that is hard to kick, as much as we think we want to. Hope and Change, after all, spoke to that frustration at how the political environment had become during the Bush Administration. Partisan in a way I hadn’t seen in my lifetime.

Admittedly, I have only truly become aware and involved in political things since 9/11/2001. That’s when I became addicted to watching Fox News. They presented the war in the most straight-forward way that showed true concern for the country and covering of the events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and home related to the war. It was 24/7 coverage. I particularly liked Studio B with Shepard Smith b/c it was the most straightforward NEWS I could find. Every newscast was full of new information without much commentary. It is one of their least commentary reliant newscasts. That is hard to find these days on any cable news.

But, for all of the Hope and Change “talk”, the country has discovered that it was only “talk”. Things are more partisan as ever. I think a lot of that comes from the hypocrisy demonstrated by the left in the way they now applaud the very things they condemned during the Bush Administration. Likewise, they condemn the very things they lauded during the Bush administration. An example of the former is spending money and increasing the deficit so mightily, when they pointed repeatedly to the disgrace of the deficit grown during the Bush Administration. And an example of the latter is their reaction to the Tea Party movement, dismissing them as “Astroturf” and calling them extreme and dangerous, when demonstrating against White House policies was considered patriotic when they did it.

I think that is where the pitch of my anxst escalated as I heard them trash and dismiss a huge segment of the citizenry. The Tea Party movement was/is historic, and yet it was mostly ignored, or presented in a very negative light. Meanwhile, other demonstrations from previous years that truly did cause damage and were hateful in their speech were presented as legitimate. Disgust was evident on the left for the allusions to comparing Obama to Hitler. That wasn’t a new tactic. They used it first with Bush. They seem to continually forget their trespasses as they attack some of the very same, and often less repulsive actions from anyone not in complete agreement with them. The hypocrisy was making me sick. Never has Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount when he says to take the log out of your eye before taking the speck out of your neighbor’s been more relevant. He hated hypocrisy too. It was all over, especially with the pharisees, the elite class at the time. For all of the “progress” we’ve made in the past 2010 years, I guess not much has changed.