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Let’s face it: We’re never going to deal with the serious problems in our county. The economy is still faltering, our debt seems insurmountable, gas prices are out of control and terrorists are still trying to blow us up with their underwear. But what issue is dominating the presidential race right now? Gay marriage.
Just a few weeks ago, the hot topic was some radio host calling a woman a “slut.”
I’ve noticed a few things about the problems we face. Each is a great threat to our way of life, every one must be handled right away, and every one is extremely boring.
I mean, most of these are the same problems we had back in the ’70s. No one solved them then, because they were distracted by the president being a bitten by a rabbit.
We’d love some fun new problems — “The polar ice caps are going to melt if we don’t change our light bulbs!” — but instead we’re stuck with these old stale ones. But, as soon as we try to sit down and focus on these imperative but dull issues, we hear that teenage Mitt Romney cut some guy’s hair, and we start spending all our time discussing that.
Maybe we’re no longer even capable of focusing on the real threats to our nation. After all, people used to have long attention spans for boring things like debt problems because all they had to distract themselves with were black-and-white movies with no CGI. Now that we have advanced technology and entertainment, we just can’t pay attention to the important things for long enough.
(I’m checking Twitter on my smartphone as I write this.)
It’s been building for some time. Based on news coverage, one of the biggest political events of my lifetime was when a vice president misspelled “potato.”
We can’t even leave it to the politicians to solve our problems, because they’re not any better. When President Obama took office, he saw the joblessness and faltering economy and decided he didn’t feel like dealing with that — instead, he started playing with his fun new health-care plan.
We all had a great time quarrelling about that one. It really took our minds off the skyrocketing unemployment.
Republicans are no help either. They keep repeating to themselves, “Just focus on the economy and jobs” — but then some social issue pops up, and they can’t help themselves.
If there is one thing the right and the left agree on this country, it’s that social issues are fun to pointlessly argue about. And we’ll always be able to argue about them, because they never get solved.
We might not mind dealing with our real problems if we could come up with fun solutions to them that involve explosions and kung-fu fighting. But there aren’t any. It’s all mind-numbing budget stuff; my eyes are glazing over just thinking about it.
Maybe we’ll just have to put Ritalin in the water to help us all focus. Because otherwise the only time our economy and the national debt will be interesting enough to hold our attention is when the country has collapsed. That will really grab everyone’s interest — you’ve seen how popular all those zombie-apocalypse shows and movies are.
I’ll bet when the government falls, the nation will divide into smaller regions ruled by warlords. I could totally be one of those. I have a shotgun, and I could make a scary-looking metal mask to wear all the time ...
Wait. What was I talking about? Did you hear Obama ate a dog?
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