There are only about 21 days left in this year’s presidential campaign – thanks be to God! The campaigns throwing aside goodness, reason, and hope, get reduced to campains – the effort to inflict as much pain on the opponent and upon all voters so that they are truly terrified about who might win the election. But the campain is never about who is going to win, it is all about who should lose, as if in losing the candidate will be assigned to oblivion never to have a place among humanity again.
We have entered the campain in which the candidates and/or their organizations endeavor to sling every spurious, and scurrilous slur they can imagine, or get away with.
And though one can develop vertigo watching the precipitously dropping stock market, both party’s campaign’s truth and ethics levels are falling even faster in the uncontrolled spin of an out of control heavier than air object. Gravity may accelerate the fall of objects at 32 feet/second/second, but the truthfulness and morality of negative campaigning drops a whole lot faster.
In a surreal sign of where things are, when John McCain tried to stop some of the outrageous and Obamaphobic comments of his supporters at one of his rallies – when he tried to re-establish respect, reason, rationality and reality – his supporters booed him! They are enjoying their phobias, anger and hatreds so much that they don’t want their candidate to take away their fix. And partly this happens because in the negative campaign they are no longer voting for McCain, they are really and only voting against Obama – so they do not want to hear McCain calling for respect. He is already irrelevant to what the campaign’s negative efforts have achieved.
In the rational world of stock markets, when the market hits a point where values are falling faster than is sane, markets suspend trading. Would that the presidential campaign had a similar sanity check, and the campaigns of the candidates would be suspended once they hit a critical free fall speed of negativity. I mentioned before that in France in the week before the election, campaign advertising is suspended – a wise move in our media dominated negative campaigns.
I certainly would encourage people to turn their TV’s and radio’s off for the next couple of weeks anytime a campaign ad comes on or anytime a talk show host or commentator starts spinning the negative nexus of nonsense.
Don’t let these phobia driven campaigns take away your hope, your humanity, your rationality. Respect for one’s opponent is a good thing, no matter how stimulating and satisfying you might find the irrational emotions of hating and fearing others.
Fraternized 