It’s a gorgeous fall day. Why am I here?

I am deeply and badly frustrated lately and it sucks.

I can’t seem to escape the build-up to the election, as much as I wish it didn’t matter, as much as I wish I could just write it off and focus on more important things.

But it really does matter. And this is more than important.

The misinformation campaign from the Romney group and the blatantly distorted commentary from their supporting news organization, Fox,  has reached unprecedented levels in the US.  Canada has actually banned Fox because of the percentage of falsities per broadcast:

“Canadian regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.” (Source)

Fox News went to court and had it put down on paper that they had no legal obligation to report the truth (Source), and Canada would prefer to keep its news programs factual.

Free speech here means there are no such requirements, and I’m for that. The danger now is that so much of our electorate is so ignorant and fearful and vulnerable to information campaigns that know how to play on and manipulate those vulnerabilities. Frightened and desperate people need a worldview to attach themselves to because it provides meaning, especially in tough times. It provides weak people with an explanation for what is sometimes difficult to explain, especially when they’re not having a great time. The pro-Christian and pro-corporate State ideology that Fox represents has found a huge audience comprised of two very different groups in the US: the impoverished, extraordinarily ignorant and hyper religious people populating most of the southern states, and the extraordinarily greedy “god gave it to me” people who worship money and live to hoard, and execute their working lives on that metric alone. The cruel trick is that the same ideology is responsible for both groups– both the churches and the corporations want your money because they think they should have it and you should not. The middle class in this country is overwhelmingly educated and liberal, and that is the class that is being decimated by the corporate state, an entity that believes everyone should be just like it.

The more time you spend in that alternate universe where greed is somehow “good”, and talking in church about doing good things is somehow more important than actually doing them, the more likely you are to consider all other sources of information some kind of “liberal conspiracy”.

The fact that this election is even close is unbelievably bad news for the true state of the US and the education and intelligence of its population. My neighbor hears “liberal” and has a whole slew of Fox commentary to recite about it.

One way to respond to that, if ever you’re bored enough, is to ask them what they mean by “liberal” or “conservative”.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Liberal. Polit.
Supporting or advocating individual rights, civil liberties, and political and social reform tending towards individual freedom or democracy with little state intervention.

Conservative. Polit.
A person who conserves or preserves something; (now usually) an adherent of traditional values, ideas, and institutions; an opponent of (social and political) change, a conservative person.

So how did the country get so divided about this? It’s very explainable. Where you fall on this has to do mostly with three things, 1) how happy or unhappy you are with how things are,  2) how well you understand why things are the way they are for you, and 3) how beholden to prescribed doctrine you are.

If you’re happy with the “system”, you’ll conserve it, it seems to be working for you. If you’re unhappy with it, you’ll want to change it, it needs to be improved. The great moral fallacy of our time is that our system has ever worked very well, has ever been truly just, fair and good for all people. Anyone wanting to “conserve” how it “used to be”, is essentially asking to conserve racism, sexism, bigotry, inequality and every other social ailment that liberal activism has fought to change for the better. Women’s rights, the entire civil rights movement, gay rights, minority empowerment and immigration support and so on, all of these are liberal causes, efforts to protect the freedom of individual people to not live under the religious or socially constructed and oppressive rules of other groups of people.

Conservatives seek to preserve what they call “traditional values”. The big and important question is what those values are.  Conserving a value for its traditional role within a society rather than its actual fitness or goodness for a society makes no sense, and is indeed the preeminent cause of human suffering worldwide. As far as I can tell, the rationale for many of those “traditional values” has to do with where they came from (a religious text) instead of what they’re good for. The corollary question is what they have ever been good for. What is a “traditional American value” that is both good and uniquely American? Every morally just aspect of the holy book exists in almost all other holy books, too, and those other books would never be considered a source of America’s “traditional values”. So what is it? Small government and more individual liberty? Then why is it the case that “conservatives” want more control over individual lives, wish to restrict the ability of people to become educated, to grow up free from religious indoctrination,  to choose a life that isn’t aimed at the worship of gold,  for women to have control over their own bodies? Liberty is a liberal value. Conservatism is a religious value. In our country we are guaranteed the separation of church and state, and the entire “conservative movement” seeks to tear that wall down.

A good dystopian story would involve the Corporate Church, who converts you to its worldview in order that you buy its shit, and if you don’t, you’re somehow evil and doomed.

These days it’s hard to think that story isn’t being written in reality right now.

I need to stop. This was supposed to be a quick update.

I’m frustrated and unhappy and concerned about so many things.