I can't stand the noise, so I don't listen -- at least to the extent that is possible. As a result, I know very little about what the current group of politicians is trying to say other than the odd sentence or comment that happens to slip through my filters. One quote that slipped through and stuck in my head was from Rudy Giuliani:
I get very, very frustrated when I...hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we've lost perspective. We've always had difficult problems, we've always had great challenges, and we've always lived in danger.
Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn't live in danger and didn't have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult than our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we're facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.
Now, I have no idea what stance Giuliani is taking on any issues (although I am a big fan of New York City), but that may be the only time in the last 20 years that I have heard a political express any such sense and perspective. Anyone with any reasonable world view would see this era as being amazingly stable and prosperous, and blissfully uneventful in any historic sense. We should be delighted by this. It means we can get on with our lives, devoting ourselves to personal relationships, spiritual fulfillment, commercial advancement, artistic or scientific achievement, and other activities vastly more valuable and important than politics. Instead, we wring our hands and convince ourselves the end is nigh unless we CHANGE or DO SOMETHING.
I suppose part of it is a combination of politicians needing to convince you they are essential to your life for the sake of their power, and journalists needing to convince you to watch cable news or buy a newspaper for their livelihood. And there are probably other reasons more deeply-seated in human neuroses. The net result is everyone goes insane. As I write this we are nearly done with 2 weeks of similar insanity in the sports world leading up to the Super Bowl. That's bad, but at least it ends. The political version of this insanity never does.
The older I get, the more it seems that the news is on a strange sort of tape loop. The nouns change, but the verbs stay the same. Look, if you were living at a pivot point in history, you wouldn't know it. You (historians) could only see it long after you're dead. Oh, you might predict that you are at a pivot point; and you might be right, but it's like any other correct historical prediction -- a lucky guess. That fact is we are so far away from any sort of real trouble that we could survive a president selected randomly from the phone book with little difficulty beyond a few years of petty annoyance.
Statistically, you (we) are extremely likely to be living in a historically uninteresting and uneventful time. Play the odds: stop fretting over politics and get on with your life. Don't bother going insane, it just makes you crazy.
(This is likely the only thing you will ever see on politics here. My apologies for causing you to suffer it.)
