Besides adapting to life without power, Americans across the fruited plains began discussing things.
Which is a very underwhelming way to describe the loud words, angry shouts and sometimes, fisticuffs, that ensured over a)the rant of Mickey Majors over the EBS system, b)what politico/political party caused this national outage, and c)what would we, “we” being the American people, were going to do about it once the power came back on.
Yon readers must believe that we didn’t, swoosh, suddenly, as a powerless country, decide that “we” were going to take any action about the blackout or Mickey Majors for that matter.
It took many hours or parlor/roadside/tent media/CB discussions and debates to get to a point that we collectively agreed that we would, indeed, do something about it. It’s not as if we had a whole lot more to do besides rant and rave over the politicians and how they totally mishandled the country. For many hours we had Mickey Majors shouting in our ears, in many cases loudly and with few ways to escape.
It’s important to note just what else was going on in the country at the time and the stage was set for doubt, anger, dismay and action.
First, President Obama told us that the Affordable Care Act would be cheaper for us, that if we liked our doctors we would keep him or her. Also there were the scandals coming out of the Obama administration in the months leading up to the blackout and this factored in to the country’s new determination.
If it wasn’t the IRS spying on us and doing us dirty it was the NSA taping and tracking our phone calls or it was guns going in to Mexico to illegals then able to enter the country by claiming persecution by the Mexican drug lords.
It was like nothing we wanted mattered.
Now I know there were plenty of people who didn’t care about illegal immigration or Obamacare or if the IRS went way out of bounds with its power. There were for sure plenty of Americans who build houses, have barking dogs….or live next to someone who does. Americans make home improvements, plan and execute wills, dispute property boundaries. A vast majority of eligible Americans have driver’s licenses if nothing else. So we all have experiences with government bureaucrats at the local level. And it was small effort to find someone in our surround who had horror stories of the problems with obtaining home inspection, passing automobiles through state inspection, changing a title on a car or getting a license to operate a small business.
The local bureaucrats that we all dealt with on a daily basis were, for the most part, our friends or neighbors, at the least, they shared our town, city or county. At some point we learned to get through the red tape as logistically we could confront our bureaucratic tormenters. A cross the fruited plains, we’d all dealt with local bureaucracies. Mostly we understood why buildings should conform to basic building tenets. We know that dogs barking excessively or grass growing too tall were problems making life not so pleasant.
But we also understood common sense and, indeed, it was during these many discussions and debates that the country wrapped its mind around common sense and the broader, more magnanimous meaning of the phrase.
The political/ruling class, we began to understand as the first hours of the blackout began to sink in as something that would be around for a while, had NO common sense.
Take immigration. All of us, every American born in this country or born without, understands our personal space and the need to defend it. Fences are our friends, so goes the common sense. The common sense, I remind, that the Ruling class does not have.
“The first job of the federal government is to protect our borders,” my neighbor, a friendly and normally mild-mannered soul, shouted at a parlor meeting in our community. Our local EBS mass speaker was located up and down a major highway and by the time we’d arranged our nightly community gatherings we were sick, sick, sick of that man’s rantings. The external EBS was transmitted via some sort of satellite dish that sent the sound waves up and down the state via…well I don’t know how but I do know that it was almost impossible to shut the thing down.
As was explained to me, what they call the “external EBS” was designed to be the voice of calm and instruction during national emergencies that might destroy tender equipment. There were backups to the original and more backups to the backups. “The stuff has to survive earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and even meteorites is my understanding,” husband Will explained. Understand that the same Mickey Majors’ rant would have been blaring out from our televisions and radios and cable stations, even our MP3 players but I think that’s a joke, had the electricity been working. The “external EBS” was created to do the job of the TV’s and radios should…well should the power go out.
The things were powered by super-strength batteries and the politicos knew all about it, or at least so I’ve been told. The American public, not so much.
The parlor debates began in earnest after about 24 hours of hearing Mickey Majors’ rant. Like I’ve mentioned, many places across the fruited plains managed to stifle the constant sound or escape the torment some way. The country had, for want of nothing much more to do, already went over and over the Majors sound bytes ad nauseam so it was time to move on to some other topic.
We were discussing immigration at this meeting of the parlor debaters, having already gone over the problems with gay marriage and the concept of “man-boy” love.
We have, as a nation and via proper electronic voting, “one-man, one-vote” and we made it happen and we made it fair, forget all that crap with or without picture ID. The political class, they didn’t want to “move forward”, the common sense came to be across the darkened fruited plains.
Well we couldn’t exactly ignore our plight and add Mickey Majors to the formula and there began a national consensus that was, well it was odd how it all happened. More on this later.
The political class, we decided both by some form of weird mental connectivity and verified by locked in, honest votes, a sort of common sense that we, the common people if you will, understood. We came to comprehend that common sense is based, loosely, on nature itself. We don’t have to sit and debate whether to continue sitting on a hot stove was prudent as the pain seared through us. Our very physiology urged us to action in that event but what about those times when we “sensed” danger, or maybe saw it in the form of a deadly snake coiled across the way? Our common sense, a combination of our experiences dictated by our urge to live, thrive and be happy, gives us warnings but there is always evil in the world and in our new world we can identify it instead of being silenced beyond our God-given common sense by the evil of political correctness.
People who wear vests on their person that will blow them up when within a crowd, these are evil people doing that. People who wrest control of our peacefully-flying airplanes and ram them into our own lawfully built buildings on our own soil….these are evil people.
I know I speak the obvious but as time went on the whole nonsense of it went way beyond the common sense.
The political class, as we now understand, does not live by the common sense. For they have none.
The political class are people who rose to a position by our very votes. When seated they built fiefdoms and outright kingdoms, the built silly bureaucracies and staffed them with well-paid unionized minions to bind us up with endless red tape….
….well never mind, I won’t sing the song for you.
So we talked during the darkened hours. Media tents were abuzz with endless topics. CB radios ran channel to channel. This country communicated more effectively and with more serious attention than any national topic discussed since the Revolutionary War, as some historians assert.
Goodness, life gets busy sometimes people. We have children and spouses and errands and full-time jobs and…as one who was derisively targeted as a low-information vote, I argue that oh no, I wasn’t low-informationed, I was information-overwhelmed.
I got my news likes most everyone else, off of CNN or Fox. No Will and I didn’t watch the evening news on the big networks all that much, figuring, as Will put it, “Since we pay for cable, why not get the news from a network devoted to news?” Which was fine with me because I never much paid attention anyway.
Oh sure, I heard the sound bytes, this was the plan. I saw the sight bytes when I signed onto America OnLine, sometimes I clicked in to read the news story. And I watched TV, even if not Walter Cronkite, and flashes of big news story would stream quick across the screen, sometimes as breaking news, most often as the headline for the news show to come on at 11pm.
I knew about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, although at first I knew about it mostly from the Huffington Post on AOL. I was busy ministering to then dying husband, praying he’d get better, trying to make him pain-free. I had to mind the home, tend to pets, visit with daughter and granddaughter. The same old boring stuff Americans do across the fruited plains every day and it’s a busy life. Some of us are political junkees and that’s as fine a pursuit of happiness on the planet but it’s just plain wrong to deride and mock those of us trying to live law-abiding happy lives without spending hours trying to figure out what that crowd in D.C. is up to you.
For sure there are real “low-information” voters, those who can’t read, who don’t own a TV or have access to the Internet, the homeless. It’s not at all the same as citizens who try to live a law-abiding happy life and “tune in” to the political front around election times and such.
Anyway, that’s my rant, I’ll shut up on it. I keep hammering at this clarification only to illustrate how the so-called opposition party totally failed to fight back against the party in power, as the common sense would deem prudent. It was the Republicans at the time, but it’s no mind. The Democrats were the same way when the Republicans held the power. The political class is the political class and in the end,- as this low-information voter discovered after hearing some truths I needed to hear-the political class takes care of itself.
Oh I get a lot of push back on that concept. “Pat you had those endless hours to hear the entire story, to learn the truth, during that national blackout. Even if the Republicans had come out with the hard truth as we learned it, would you have listened?”
Probably not.
But what? Why couldn’t the Republicans have used sound and sight bytes like the party in power?
What we had, folks, was a massive propaganda campaign waged upon us with a whole lot of corruption and power-grabbing inter-woven through it all.
Yes, it took a national power outage, an endless public rant by some rabid radical homosexual and boom, quite a bit of time to discuss amongst ourselves.
The Perfect Storm, again.
Some say Nah….what we are calling The Perfect Storm was really God Blessing America.
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