October 18, 2015

Americans appear to be a troubled people. The rigid digital perspective of those controlling our commercial and public communication is directly opposed to the humanistic Aristotelian logic that has for centuries endowed our speech and its writings with the capacity to convey meaning. Legally navigated profit opportunists and Internet technology fanatics have debased our collective intellect and greatly atrophied our sense of humor.

Thankfully, Saturday Night Live saves us from ourselves. But when we stop laughing, a non-humanist anti-logical attitude is life threatening. It threatens because we have begun to speak, write, record, and deliver too many technological utterances that do not make sense. But, we treat them as if they do. And we don’t even notice how mindlessly bureaucratic all our thinking has become.

When you and I start to hear things said to us that do not make sense, accepting them as making sense, and automatically responding as if they did, we are signing our own mutual long-term suicide pact. Our inhumanely-inclining human species becomes eventually vulnerable to destructive tendencies.

SNL’s last program saved us from imminent extinction with its belly laugh mimicking of our Democratic candidates. They were so spot on, and actually acknowledged as such by at least one candidate, good old Bernie Sanders, everyman’s man, that they insinuated a bit of hope into the American game of life. SNL reinvigorates us with its good-humored satire. Hopefully, it may buoy all of us up through this presidential election.

However, such an irrefutable fact as corporate control over who acquires a higher education by pricing it out of attainment of the poor is self destructive. The same goes for medicine. All humans need knowledge and good health to play the game of life from a level field. When a society consciously creates and supports an economic system that denies millions of both, it is defining the road to its own demise.

That is hard to laugh at, no matter how it is packaged on Saturday Night Live. When we are condemned to choose among an unconscionably arrogant billionaire, two apparent political dynastic heirs to the throne, several extreme right wing illiterates, a well-meaning wizened popular uncle, and others whose names most of us only barely recognize, the job challenges us to the limit

We hear more on National Public Radio about pop music than we do our political issues. Except occasionally from our well meaning uncle, I rarely hear from candidates the words I want defining the real issues that confront America today: thirty million in poverty, tens of thousands homeless for decades; an allegedly Christian populace largely ignoring their plight; an economy primarily founded on the manufacture of weapons of mass destructive armaments; one in ten jobless; youth financially crippled by the overly impassioned greed of adults who should be guarding them and nurturing their futures.

When will the campaign and media begin to focus directly on the country’s real human problems and their potential solutions? When will it pierce through the media show and enter the realm of tangible reality? When will Americans demand that candidates acknowledge our responsibility to one another as members of our compromised democracy; and substantively articulate their ideas?

It’s an intensely perplexing question. It is deeply troubling to the mind. What issues do you want to hear discussed by the candidates? Send your thoughts in to me. I’ll compile them and return them to everyone on my contact list. Perhaps, some of us may be able to enlighten the others about issues we too find missing, as we slog through our childish consumption-addicted swampland.

Oh, by the way, watch out for the alligators. They’re as thick as thieves.