Make-believe

Make-believe was a game we played as children. Playing make-believe is pretending that things are a certain way, even though you know they are really somehow else. When the games begin today, though, we're going to see all the little kiddies playing it again, and with much more enthusiasm than they showed when they were kids, I'm sure.

Let's face it. We love to deceive ourselves. We love to pretend that things are one way when we know they are just different in reality. As children, our contact with reality is not so strong, and it's easy to play make-believe. As adults, we're constantly confronted with reality, and given the current one in America, I can understand why so many would like to lessen that contact with reality. It certainly ain't what it used to be (even if I'm convinced, it never was what it claimed to be).

It's sad, but I sense a feeling of desperation over there. Things just aren't working out like they're supposed to. Crime rates are coming down, slowly, but they're still exceptionally high. The introduction of more and more legislation to keep things in order in only leading to more crime (that is, the crime base is broadening, even if the numbers of violent crime are reducing). The economy isn't doing very well; the perpetrators of the 2008 meltdown won't be prosecuted, and the level of force being used against peaceful demonstrators is increasing to what I would consider to be dangerous levels. These things are not evidence of a society that is self-confident enough to handle its problems. And, yes, that makes me sad.

But, let's face it: over the next three months it's going to get a lot worse. There are deep policy issues to be dealt with, but we all know what the Super-PAC ads are going to be like, from both the major parties. There will be name-calling, fact-distortion (if not downright, fact-fantasies), loud, abusive, and most likely violet rhetoric. I really have the feeling that regardless of how few people are going to go vote (and isn't it ironic that the country that considers itself the cradle of modern democratic ideals has the lowest voter turnout rates of all the western industrialized countries?) most will simply be voting against the other guy. There are increasingly fewer and fewer people who are actually for anything anymore. That makes me sad, too.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not wallowing in self-pity or nostalgia or anything for that matter. It's sad when you see things that could be different won't be different because, for the most part, we have simply come to believe that our make-believe is real.