Wednesday, August 20, 2014

What planet do you live on?

What planet do I live on?  I’ve been asking myself this question for years.  What planet do you live on?  Do you live on a planet where so-called educators in Texas are paid good money to write text books stating that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs?  Does your planet then have schools adopt these texts and with the full authority of teachers and adults, make little children read these books?  How about text books suggesting that slavery in America was a pretty good deal for Native Americans and the blacks kidnapped by the tens of thousands from Africa?  Is this the best history that money can buy?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live on that planet. 

Do you live on a planet where hundreds of millions of dollars earned by fossil fuel companies are spent telling you that climate change, AKA global warming, is a plot by scientists who are getting rich by lying to us all about it?  Oh, the horror of the conspiracies by people that actually pay attention to verifiable data!  You don't ever want to trust someone who actually pays attention to something that isn't in the fossil fuel propaganda stream.  Unfortunately, I live on that planet, but I'm not happy about it.

Does your planet have people that are more upset about “rude behavior” on FB than they seem to be about Ukraine, Palestine, ISIS in Iraq, or the governor of Texas with a 50 caliber machine gun on the Mexican border?  Do they unfriend you for saying that you don’t understand what Rick Perry even thinks that he is saying?  If you question things that you believe to be obviously indefensible, do you get push back from people that you thought were rational?  That’s not a planet I want to live on.


Does your planet have people that think that George W. Bush/Dick Cheney was/were better presidents than Barack Obama?  If you ask them to explain why they think this way can you discuss with them the merits of their facts/beliefs?  Can you really understand anything that they are saying?  Can they understand anything that you are saying?  

If money is speech, the more money you have, the more you get to speak.  Therefore, you get to shop for the kind of speech that you want to be true.  And if you have enough money; you can make anything true.

Rupert Murdoch lives on this planet and he has confused way too many people, and they are making me wonder where I want to live.