The Dallas Morning News columnist, Steve Blow has some excellent words for us all to read today. I am reprinting this without permission, but I am giving all the credit to the man who write it.Very smart words.
Steve Blow: Looking on the bright side feels lonely these days
By Steve Blow
Columnist
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But right now, the bias leaves me feeling particularly at odds with the world around me.
In brief, I’m bent toward optimism.
It’s not the worst bias to have. In fact, I’m grateful for whatever random acts of nature or caring acts of nurture left me with this tendency to see things in a positive and hopeful way.
I got light duty in life compared to those burdened with a constant apprehension of doom and decline.
I’m grateful for their vigilance — and glad not to live that way.
But more and more, it’s the cataclysmic view of life that seems to hold sway. I think it explains so much of our politics today.
Until last week, it was unimaginable that a U.S. House majority leader could lose office to a barely funded political newcomer. Did you see Newt Gingrich’s explanation?
“There’s a large element of America that wants a fight,” he said. “If you’re a conservative, you think Barack Obama is literally destroying the country you love.”
Now, Gingrich is a man smart about words. He’s not misusing “literally” in the way people will say “It literally killed me.”
When he says “literally,” he means actually, factually so. He means the belief is widespread that the president of our nation is willfully, successfully killing the country.
What nonsense. But that sort of explains everything, doesn’t it? The tenor of the times, I mean. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
I was on a conservative website last week and an ad popped up. “Barack Obama’s Plan to Destroy the United States!” it said. “Enter your email here to get free report.”
If politics seems irrational right now, it’s because it’s based on irrational beliefs. Love him or hate him, the president is not destroying our country.
And I don’t think that’s just my optimism bias talking. Or is it?
See, that’s the thing I wrestle with right now. Who is deluded here?
In a letter to the editor on Friday, a Plano resident said he’s “alarmed at how rogue this president has become.”
“Rogue”? Really? The word to me suggests reckless, out of control, outside the law.
If anything, I’m amazed at how quiescent Obama seems these days — especially for a guy painted by his opponents as a leftist radical.
I see more Ward Cleaver than Eldridge Cleaver right now.
At the Texas Republican Convention in Fort Worth last weekend, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz stoked the crowd with fiery rhetoric, including this statement: “Today, liberty is under assault like never before.”
Wow, that’s alarming. And those are definitely fighting words. But are they true? Could they possibly be true?
I don’t have degrees from Princeton and Harvard like Cruz does. But this humble graduate of Tyler Junior College and the University of North Texas can quickly think of a dozen times in our history when liberty seemed under far greater threat than today.
You encounter claims of calamity everywhere you turn these days. I get emails from frantic readers on a regular basis.
The Mexicans are taking over. The Muslims are taking over. The Chinese are taking over. The atheists are taking over. The “takers” are taking over.
The national debt is killing us. Government regulation is killing us. Taxes are killing us. The Federal Reserve is killing us. U.N. Agenda 21 is killing us.
If anything is taking over, it’s a kind of political hysteria. If anything is killing us, it’s our inability to deal with problems in a calm, common-sense way.
I’m biased toward optimism, but not so much right now.
Follow Steve Blow on Twitter at @DMNSteveBlow and on Facebook at facebook.com/DMNSteveBlow.
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