Filed under: Politics | Tags: Constant Controversy, Feeling Off, Integrity, Strange Times
There are expressions that we use, that may just be family expressions, unknown to others or perhaps they are common, but unexamined. The one that brought this on was “feeling a little out of sorts”. Probably been using the expression all my life without ever giving it the slightest thought or attention. What on earth does “out of sorts” mean? Odd. Is this an expression you use? or don’t use but you’ve heard it before? Have no idea? The meaning is simple enough, feeling a little ‘off.’ not quite right, that sort of thing. And it’s descriptive because its so vague.
That seems to describe the current period in our history rather well. A little out of sorts. Things are a little off. President Biden has essentially invited the citizens of Central America to come to the United States and we will invite them in, give them jobs, maybe citizenship, and apparently even stimulus checks. Central America doesn’t seem to be particularly flush with high paying jobs, excellent governance, great schools, and the people have responded directly to President Biden’s invitation, so enthusiastically that it has created a huge crisis on our border, a degree of fury from the border states that can hardly cope, a border patrol that is overwhelmed. and now President Biden is thinking about paying them just to go back home. Out of sorts indeed.
The most recent flap, and they seem to come along all too frequently, has been in Georgia and the state’s attempt to tidy up their voting regulations. States are responsible for setting their own regulations, it’s not the federal government’s task.
The election in Georgia was controversial, there were questions about the integrity of the vote, some ballots were scanned more than once, suitcases of ballots turned up after things were counted, lots of questions, so the state government wanted to straighten it all out and restore confidence.
They intended to tidy up the hours of voting, add some clarification of who was entitled to vote and where. In other words, when were the polls to open and for what hours, and how did you make sure that only those who were entitled to vote got to do so in the right precinct. They adjusted the hours so that working people had time to vote and still do their jobs, with the opportunity to vote on their way to work or after work. Seemed simple enough. And to make sure that they were entitled to vote because that was their precinct, they asked voters to show I.D. to identify themselves.
Because this is an “out of sorts” time, some large businesses assumed that this effort was a racist attempt to keep blacks from voting, and because businesses are extra sensitive to accusations of racism, they decided, without any effort to actually read the law as rewritten to proclaim it racist and unacceptable and the National Baseball League pulled their big tournament out of Georgia, and Delta Airlines, Coca Cola made a stink, and the national news piled on. And apparently not even the national newsmen bothered to actually read the new regulations. Massive nothingburger.
My point is that there’s a remarkable amount of stuff going on where no one has bothered to read what was actually said. Newsmen call in their celebrities to sound off on events that never happened. Big Tech, being closely involved with the news is also terrified of being blamed for something, and has gathered scads of “fact checkers” who may not know any more than the rest of us do, to proclaim what is true and what is false. And than everybody will act on that which has been proclaimed to be fact, but very well may not be and it’s probably racist anyway.
That’s what I mean by “Out of sorts”.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
American Elephants 