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Editorial
Waves Of Fear: FDR's Famous Words Might Be Lampooned Or Ignored These Days

How about those Ebola fears that rampaged through one of our local school districts this past week, all because a student returned from Africa and people didn't take the time to see just how huge the continent is. That's like having someone ask a kid in Ellenville if they know so and so, who lives in Anchorage... only worse. Because the stress of such health fears is unhealthy in itself.

Then again, how can one blame anyone when politicians are using disease as a campaign tool? Instead of figuring out how we can help a bad situation from getting worse we're seeing victims getting pilloried by their neighbors, or cable news hosts, and the sending of troops to help other nations treated as an aberration. Would we have ever been able to survive the Black Plague during the Middle Ages with such attitudes; or get beyond the millions-killing influenza outbreak of 1918, or defeated the likes of smallpox and polio?

Ah, waves of fear... at least they subside at times, usually when the most fearful have the reins of power. But oh how they hurt the hearts of those who tend to see caring for more than oneself as something that can still be noble. Look at the ways in which some of our counties have again started trumpeting the arrests of "welfare cheats," as though those being prosecuted weren't down already. Or others are investigating voting rights by looking into the nature of one's housing, as if it wasn't established decades ago that the voting franchise was available even to those without homes. Make that case in many states these days, though, and one would be laughed at and told all about voter fraud, even though such things are about as rare as Ebola victims in U.S. hospitals. Just as any mention of the new attitudes regarding social services, where police are checking IDs to ensure no outstanding warrants are going unfound, leave many rolling their eyes.

Are we as Americans still a full nation of the lucky and unlucky, where we help those who have slipped regain their footing? A place that pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression without slipping into Fascism, then helped the rest of the world enter a new age?

Ah, it IS election season and even though the campaigns this year tend to be about the degrees of negative advertising one can thrust at an opponent, or complaints about programs some of us like and others don't, such issues underlie all we'll be voting on come November 4.

In the end, though, few are talking about such big concepts because that's no longer the nature of campaigning in America. Here, we spend more time looking at, and sometimes yelling at, polls... then blaming those who are losing for losing. Or lamenting how money's being spent, or how many lawn signs one candidate has versus another (as if we might not be at the end of the era of such things).

Blames sports, or at least sports broadcasting, for this sorry state of things. Because, as with the way we follow favorite football, baseball or basketball teams, we now follow political parties, and no longer even individual candidates, as though they offer anything substantive other than being OUR team. Which means we degrade the very purpose of government, and social interaction, to the level where it's no longer about getting things done but winning, no matter whether what one's winning with is the best outcome.

Pie in the sky naivete, you say? Hey, the best answers tend to come through tests, and interaction... not one team "winning" based on fan's ardor. And no, sports are not about "best" teams, they're about money and luck and a host of competitive elements that have little to do with real problem solving skills.

In other words, it's not about the transformative elements we need to get as an end result for these political races, as a means of ensuring our roads get fixed and we can face diseases like Ebola, or provide help for those who need it, without having to decide whether such things are better than keeping money in our individual pockets or not.

Nothing to fear but fear itself? Hah... more like plenty to fear, now, from a growing inability to listen to anything but our own mindless cheerings.


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