House of Mirrors

When I was very young I remember walking through the carnival attraction full of mirrors that distorted images. Mirrors would stretch me very tall and thin or short and squat, or distort my face and body into a variety of strange and often funny shapes.

These days I think there must be millions of people who view the world in these kinds of mirrors. The mirrors are provided by media outlets and political propagandists, who have successfully convinced so many to believe unquestioningly in the grossly distorted images they choose to present.

Distortions are present on both the right and left, and here is my list of the most egregious examples on both sides:

From the Left:

• Bush initiated the Iraq war only to enrich his buddies in the oil business (read:Halliburton) and Iraq and Saddam have nothing to do with terrorism.
• The disaster of Katrina wouldn't have happened if Bush cared anything about global warming and the environment.
• Bush is spreading ignorance in his anti-science policies that won't allow research that could produce major cures of disease.
• If Bush is allowed to nominate justices to the Supreme Court like John Roberts, suddenly young pregnant women will be dying by the millions, racial segregation and discrimination will return, and Christianity will be forced on all citizens as the "official" US religion.
• Big corporations will conspire with the help of the government to push all American workers into poverty and deny access to healthcare to the masses of people.
• That Labor Unions are in touch with their membership and are spending their money wisely on things that will directly benefit their members. And the Union leadership is not corrupt.
  
• Christian conservatives are all about imposing their morals on everyone else, and will team with the Bush administration to persecute atheists, gays, and women who have had abortions.
• That tax cuts only benefited the wealthy.
• That oil exploration, whether offshore or in ANWAR, should be opposed on environmental grounds plus the evil, greedy oil companies don't need more oil wells to pad their profits.
  
• That conservatives don't care about the poor, and would eliminate welfare programs, letting poor people starve in our cities to save a few dollars on taxes.
• That illegal immigrants are nothing more than poor people looking for a better life, and we should use tax money to help them adjust to their new lives here.
  

From the Right:

• That "Free Trade" is good for our country, even when it includes slave labor in third world countries making the cheap goods we buy at Wal-Mart. And even when it means importing programmers from India to replace American technology workers because they will accept 10-20% of the wages. And even though we have almost lost our ability to make things in our country.
  
• That there is no Anti-Trust problem in our country.
• That all Unions are inherently evil and corrupt, and completely unnecessary.
• That illegal immigrants are valuable because they take the jobs nobody else will do.
• That raising the minimum wage to $6 or $6.50 would harm the economy.
• That there hasn't been an erosion in the standards of living for the middle class.
  
• That corporate executives are not grossly overcompensated in comparison to the workforce.
• That big companies walking away from their employee pension obligations is not a big problem.
• That the status quo in healthcare is just fine.
• That Republicans in congress are actually following their own party's philosophy on smaller government and lower spending.

I can go on and on and on in both categories. The truth is that there are plenty of things going wrong in government that can be blamed on both political parties. Reasonable people can agree on many things regardless of which political philosophy fits their world view. However, these days there is so much distortion in party rhetoric that we've lost our ability to hold our government responsible for being good stewards of our resources and making the right decisions, in fear of being criticized by some special interest group or another that will get plenty of help from a biased media in holding up one of those distorted mirrors to the decision.

Everyone, I don't care whether you are right or left, must stop looking at the fun house mirrors and find a window on the truth. Only then can we elect the right people to office and hold them accountable to do the right thing for their country.