Polls, Press & Politics

The Presidential campaign season has officially begun in the midst of a national debt crisis, an unemployment crisis and a European economic crisis. One would assume that the President, the members of Congress, the candidates, the press and the pollsters would focus on the problems at hand and ways to solve them.

Instead, the pollsters are interested in a straw poll on the presidential candidates, the press in the characters that play them and the politicians in their vacations and their own campaigns. That brings to mind Nero who fiddled while Rome burned.

I must take life too seriously. I ought to simply skip the headlines and the news channels and ignore drama after drama that is being played out by those financially well-heeled and politically powerful at the expense of those that are poor since they are the ones who will ultimately bear the heaviest of burdens, not me.

My doomsday scenario is not pretty. Even though the rich and the powerful will lose a significant portion of their wealth, they nonetheless will still have their organic feed (no typo here), their healthcare, their expensive toys and their vacations.

Not the poor. They will work harder and have less, and when they become sick, even with Obamacare, assuming it overcomes all constitutional challenges, I imagine that they will not have quick access to good health care. Whatever care they will get will only be gotten after long waiting periods and excessive red tape that will cost society more in lawsuits than Obama ever imagined, even though Obama had argued that it will save money in the long run. As the saying goes, in the long run, we will all be dead.

Meanwhile, should we not attempt to minimize the damage that I believe will come?

If so, why then does the media not turn its collective lens back on the issues and ways to solve them instead of chasing after the latest political gaffe, sensationalizing it and ending up with nothing productive or worse, another GW Bush and more wars? In that case, Obamacare would be cheap by comparison in terms of dollars and lives spent.

I am so disillusioned.