All Blogged Down

Since the beginning of this blog, its title has been "Hobbling Through The Zeitgeist," but I'm beginning to think that was a bit too optimistic.

It's not about me you understand - I'm still hobbling around reasonably well, thanks to regular doses of ibuprofen and scotch. What it is about is the feeling I have that for the last little while in our country, we're barely able to crawl through the zeitgeist, much less hobble.

No doubt the weight of financial distress and of its multitudinous ramifications has slowed all of us down as we try to manage our lives, lives which have not proceeded along the pathways about which we had hoped and dreamed.

On top of it all, we have a bunch of prancing politicians for whom truth is no longer a virtue and who demonstrate few of the characteristics of being adults. Assertion is the new substitute for fact, and fact - you may recall - is one of the essential building blocks of knowledge. Knowledge, as well as informed and thoughtful speculation, is what adults use. Knowledge is not much in fashion these days, and so we are slouching toward a new "dark age," where the loudest voices will shut out the informed and knowledgeable ones.

You would do well to read Richard Hofstadters "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," his Pulitzer Prize winning attempt to understand why so many of us believe that ignorance really is bliss, most notably in the fields of politics, religion, and education. His ideas continue to resonate today.

Our infrastructure decays, our schools struggle, local, state and federal governments rob Peter to pay Paul, and the media pushes assertions and not necessarily facts, we believe that we can pay off the national debt by standing on the sidelines and bitching.

Some of us are old enough to remember the words of Walt Kelly's cartoon character Pogo. "We has met the enemy," he said, "and they is us."

That will still be true until the day arrives when we can agree on the facts and find a bunch of grown-ups who will go to Washington and worry a bit less about their own skins and a hell of a lot more about the future of the country. If we're lucky, we may be able to avoid the darkness, out there, waiting. Like me, I think you can sense it.