A Made-Up Controversy -  "Us" Against "Them"
Image by John Hain 

Updated 01/17/2021:

This short article below was written way back 2013 in pre-Trump America. While watching the sacking of the US capitol, I am reminded of the direct line between this event, the election of Donald Trump and the creation of the cartoonist fake grassroots protesting "Tea Party" created by the network of wealthy malcontents. All that was to influence the midterm election of 2010. It was successful and ushered in even more voter suppression and gerrymandering par excellence. .They are really nothing more than these same rebel rousers storming the Capitol just wearing expensive suits and bulging bank accounts.

The internet was the mode of distribution of this. Twitter and Facebook are the ones most people know but the smart ones and the ones to look out for are not there. Telegraph was the preferred by Middle East terrorists and apparently some locals. There are many more hardcore and of course there is the dark web. That doesn't make the internet bad only the people who run  it for profit at the expense of all others.

As for the Capitol rampage. This is mainly a bunch of rebellious "teenagers" that have been radicalized by the internet and Fox news. Nothing new here, however, it was pamphlets before this modern era. And before Gutenberg I suppose it was travelling minstrels.

Although some of these guys need to be isolated in jail as they are the usual 5-10%. Most just need a public shaming. The government officials and police that are paid to act responsibly yet participated in the mob need to be fired. And those in Congress need to be purged... if Speaker Pelosi has any "balls". Time to go to the mattress, politically speaking of course, with them. They have had plenty of chances to behave and their bad examples can no longer be tolerated in a civil society.

Fox News greatly enhanced this political environment to start with and they created Trump. Others copied. Social media is mainly responsible for the recent most corrosive political environment but what I have come to learn is the result we are seeing now is the product over the past 50 years of just a few thousand influential people whose goal is power, reduce taxes, deregulate the business environment, and maintain a desperate work force.

I stand by what I wrote in 2013. But punish the very guilty and publicly shame the rest even if they are rich and powerful. And now it is time for the rest of us to put aside these childish things and work together as the world really is in peril. Seriously.


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What a mess we have made these past 50 plus odd years. We who are in our twilight years need to hang our heads in shame for how we caused or allowed America to fall to the bottom of the industrialized civil nations.

Back To The Future "2013"

When people stop fighting and start listening, a funny thing happens. They realize they have much more in common than they thought.

Unfortunately, the media and the political medium encourage us to divide ourselves into "teams". There's us and then there's "them": whether it's conservative vs. liberal, progressive vs. tea party, republican vs. democrat or any other party, or right-wing vs. left-wing.

It becomes a barrier to constructive communication because we usually start off by assuming that we are diametrically opposed in our beliefs and our desires. However, is that really the case?

The following videos show a conversation between these supposedly opposite viewpoints and show that "we the people" actually have a lot more opinions in common that we have been led to believe.

Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler (who has since resigned from the organization) might be a conservative at heart, but this recent exchange from Seattle's Citizen University conference is an inspiring reminder that "right" and "left" share a lot more common ground than people might think.

This video is an excerpt from a talk at the Citizen University conference in Seattle on March 23rd 2013.

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To learn more about the process Mark and Joan used to find common ground, check out Living Room Conversations

Here are a few examples of Living Room Conversations where people with divergent viewpoints come together to have a conversation:

Celebrating Political Diversity at Wisdom 2.0:
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The America That We Want To Be:
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About the Author

jenningsRobert Jennings is co-publisher of InnerSelf.com with his wife Marie T Russell. He attended the University of Florida, Southern Technical Institute, and the University of Central Florida with studies in real estate, urban development, finance, architectural engineering, and elementary education. He was a member of the US Marine Corps and The US Army having commanded a field artillery battery in Germany. He worked in real estate finance, construction and development for 25 years before starting InnerSelf.com in 1996.

InnerSelf is dedicated to sharing information that allows people to make educated and insightful choices in their personal life, for the good of the commons, and for the well-being of the planet. InnerSelf Magazine is in its 30+year of publication in either print (1984-1995) or online as InnerSelf.com. Please support our work.

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