America on a collision course
Who would ever have guessed that we would be looking back at the presidential campaign of 2008 as a time of relative tranquillity and good fellowship?
Bob Greene made the above observation in his article Commentary: America on a collision course on cnn.com. Greene examines and laments the current political tension that is miring our country. It is an article well worth reading.
My favorite part was the Nixon quote: “In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.
“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”
But alas, I tend to agree with the authors final statement.
I am not one who shies away from conflict, but the political rhetoric from the past few months has completely drained (and depressed) me.
I tend to blame the talking heads (from both sides) for their dishonest portrayal of opposing viewpoints and their propensity to use overly-charged language, but of course the blame goes much deeper into all of us who refuse to hear the other side and have difficulty separating our views of a person from their political ideology.
It is with sorrow that I say I have no idea how we get on a better path unless we all get so sick and tired of this we demand a new way of thinking… or we encounter a shared national experience (i.e. 9/11) that forces us to reassess our relationship to one another.
Do you feel a competitive third party would change things? Forgetting for a moment the difficulty of establishing a competitive third party.
I don’t think a third party would do anything besides weaken one of the 2 existing parties, but I do think a 4 party system makes sense. I propose: Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, Socialists. Of course when it comes to electing a president I think the middle two parties would always win, but I think the “fringe” parties could be well represented in the Legislature and perhaps with governorships.