For the Times They're NOT a Changin'

Hey, ever notice that we voluntarily get all of our information from sources with a means and motive to frame it to their advantage and often at your cost?  Just sayin' because I was thinking this morning about all the terrorist attacks is Europe and elsewhere of late.  It's been  much safer in the US than elsewhere and if anyone else had been president, we'd be saying "he kept us safe" instead of blaming him for every bomb and bullet from Bombay to Boston..

Frame of reference -- and the picture looks different when the frame is gilt and ornate just as the latest fashions look much better in the store window on the dummy then they do on you.  But we don't see those fashions presented by critics do we?  Nobody has any financial interest in telling you what you really look like in those yoga pants. The people who write articles and who put stories in front of you, packaged and wrapped in hyperbole, framed and matted and lit with a spotlight on the gallery wall -- they have a strong interest in getting your attention and your credit card number.  None of them more so than those who don't want  you to think one thing or another is getting better ore even staying the same.  Think about how much of what you see and hear and read supports the idea that everything is going to hell and this, that or the other group is the primary victim or the primary culprit.

Take racism: real problem, real victims, but "we need to have a conversation," we're told. Just as in any political debate, the questions are limited and the organizations handing us that conversation want to make sure the vocabulary is just as limited lest the wrong conclusions arise.  Think Clarence Thomas is an underqualified judge?  It was a "lynching" roared the headlines. Think that's a slap to the dead faces of martyrs?  Yep, but don't say it, you're not authorized by the activists to use facts without approval.

I read this one this morning "They said they're not racists but racists always say that."  So how may we respond but with Mea Culpa because the implication is that if you deny racism, you're a racist. An elementary fallacy of course , but this is America the stupid and we're all trained to feel like it's a falling and fallen world  I strongly  hate racism, but hey, that doesn't matter because racists always say that.  Best to be quiet and listen to the lecture conversation.

So when we read that a black kid is run down and killed, it has to be framed as a lynching and stressed that the mob action that by the time I was born had killed perhaps 4000 pretty much innocent people lest anyone think  anything is getting better:

"The lynching of Craig Anderson echoed a brutal and violent form of racism that many locals had thought long gone. Yet here it was manifested in a group of teenagers born more than two decades after the civil rights era."

Hyperbolic?  I think so.  Horrible, but hyperbolic and presented to illustrate that things are just as bad as they were in the Jim Crow era, which they are not.  So what would we hear about a far more brutal, racially motivated murder of a child?  Practically nothing as this case illustrates and it's because our news is generated and presented by groups, organizations of activists, drowning out the big picture with marching bands, TV extravaganzas and media Blitzkrieg. 

So how long will it be before this post  is denounced as racism?  I think I'm telling people to consider the source when forming opinions about events, but then racists always say that and so I' must be one.  After all if A then B it must be that if B then A, right?  You can't trust white people anyway.

So sure, about that "conversation"  You may not discuss laws passed through Congress by the Democrats with much support by the voters. You must maintain that nothing has changed for the good, you racist you -- and you will not discuss the sanctity of human life, you will not talk about lynchings when the Murdered are Hispanic or Native American or Chinese.  News is not news you dummy, it's propaganda and you will not stand in the way you hear?