The message of religion:
"Be nice; don't kill people."
Daily, an apprehension about what "The News" will bring. ("No thank you, I don't want any"...)
People speak up in "Comments":
NYC
"I am a liberal Democrat, but seriously considering voting for Trump. Why? Trump is the only one who speaks the truth about 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq....
As for banning all Muslims entry into the United States - no, that is too extreme. However, a ban on all people from Saudi Arabia....absolutely yes, they are the root cause of the extremist ideology, funding & terror."
James, Raleigh.
"Just because that's what they want doesn't mean we shouldn't give it to them. Sometimes one must do what one must do, and what we must do here is obvious: the western powers need to deal out a merciless attack on ISIS, an apocalyptic leveling"....
Robert Knox. Mill Valley, California
"The failure to keep our nation safe is the GOP's failure to take any action to control weapons of mass destruction that are sold in every town in this country -- also known as semi-automatic weapons.
These WMD's are used by Americans to kill Americans every week. Obama supported the extremely modest legislation proposed last week -- and the GOP voted in lock-step against it. The GOP is failing to protect the people of our country from domestic terrorism."
Mark Lebow. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
"Start fining the Internet service providers of those who use their subscriptions to declare loyalty to ISIS, anti-government militias, or any other group which calls on its believers to commit crimes.
Fine them, take away their bandwidth, or publicly shun them if need be, but it's their duty to police their members no matter how much they complain that they can't.
Oh, and it was a good, responsible speech, President Obama."
Mike. Harrison, New York
"It wasn't so long ago that public media was a unifying and assimilating force in our culture. Everyone shared in a common experience, and our temper was defined by popular sitcoms.
The fracturing of our mass media into special interest pockets has unsettled our world. It's not just ISIS. The press seems to have forgotten that there was another mass murder...a shooter at a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. My bet, if you went through his "social media" history, you'd find the same sort of stuff, with a slightly different political slant.
In the mass media days, oddball people lived like hermits and were shunned. In the new social media days, they readily find virtual communities which echo and reinforce their nutty views. And they no longer seem so odd to the rest of us, because we're all doing it. This is the world we've created."
IWB.
"If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it." -- Mark Twain.
I've concluded we are run by One Party.
Voting will change nothing.
We are living in a corporate fascist warfare-welfare empire of debt run by billionaires and bankers.
The Republican / Democrat kabuki theater is designed to keep the sheeple distracted and angry at each other. This keeps them from focusing on the oligarchs stealing them blind, luring them into debt, and using their children as cannon fodder in un-Constitutional wars around the globe.
_______________[end, Internet Comments]
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------------- I think I would rather retreat into art and write about that; just turn my back on Stuff.
------------ In Bob Dylan In America, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz writes a passage in Chapter 3 which speaks to this feeling:
---------------- [excerpt] ----------------- On Halloween night 1964, a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan spellbound an...audience at Philharmonic Hall in New York....He sang seventeen songs....
The times seemed increasingly out of joint during the weeks before the concert. The trauma of John F. Kennedy's assassination less than a year earlier had barely abated.
Over the summer, the disappearance in Mississippi of the young civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and the recovery of their beaten and murdered bodies, had created traumas anew.
President Lyndon Johnson managed to push a civil-rights bill through Congress in July 1964; by early autumn, it seemed as if he would trounce the archconservative Barry Goldwater in the coming election and usher in an updated New Deal.
But in August, Johnson received a congressional blank check to escalate American involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
On a single day in mid-October, the Soviet leader,
Nikita Khrushchev, was overthrown and Communist China exploded its first atomic bomb.
A hopeful phase of the decade was quickly winding down, and a scarier phase loomed.
Dylan's style and his art were changing too, with an accelerating and bewildering swiftness befitting the times. As early as the summer of 1963, he had put the folk establishment on notice
in "For Dave Glover," a prose poem he was asked to write for the Newport Folk Festival program, asserting that, although he had great respect for the older folk songs and their traditions, he would write new songs as he liked....
In Sing Out! magazine, Irwin Silber published "An Open Letter to Bob Dylan," complaining that Dylan's "new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner probing, self-conscious..."
...Dylan's politics actually hadn't disappeared, as Silber charged, but only become less preachy and much funnier,
as in the joke-saga "Motorpsycho Nitemare" on Another Side. Dylan had always sung intensely personal songs. His most powerful political material often involved human-sized stories....
And amid the disorientation of late 1963 and 1964, who was to say that a turn to introspection was out of place? ---------------------- [end excerpt]
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{book excerpt - Bob Dylan In America. Sean Wilentz. 2010. Doubleday.}
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