Perhaps the most devious aspect of human nature is the tendency of one person to demean or humiliate other people who think differently. We see it all the time, especially in politics — from General “Betray Us” to Harry Reid calling President Bush a “loser” on the Senate floor, to Ann Coulter’s new book If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. It is disgraceful and disgusting, but that is the nature of American politics in the 21st century.
In America, we all enjoy the freedom to speak freely and openly about our opinions on anything from the merits of the Iraq war to whether or not Britney Spears is a train wreck.
The freedom to express ourselves is the foundation of many of our other freedoms. It is the fundamental aspect of all free societies. However, in the last 10 or 20 years, many people have used their freedom of speech to justify vicious personal attacks and engage in, as the Clintons infamously put it, “the politics of personal destruction.”
We see personal attacks in the news all the time; Keith Olbermann calls Fox News “worse than al-Qaeda,” Rush Limbaugh calls Iraq veterans who oppose the war “phony soldiers” and Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell have called each other just about everything else.
In today’s world, it is rare for any two people to be able to respectfully discuss their differences. As a result, America is stuck in political gridlock that is allowing many major problems to get bigger and bigger.
Our legislators in Congress are much more concerned with calling a bunch of hearings and conducting a bunch of investigations to try to make political points than they are with trying to fix our broken health care, education, immigration and social security systems. But who can blame them for acting the way they do? The media loves it.
The mainstream media embraces the bullying tactics of the people whom they agree with. It’s no secret that most news reporting today is driven by ideology and it has affected the quality of the news we receive in this country.
Fox News reports mainly from the right and just about everything else reports from varying degrees to the left. The New York Times gave MoveOn.org a $116,000 discount to post its despicable ad attacking Gen. Petreaus’s integrity in its newspaper. That’s only one; I could go on and on but I have a word limit to abide by.
An unfortunate result of the political bullying is that many people who want to express themselves are ridiculed for their opinions.
It is sad to say that name-calling is becoming more prevalent in our society as we become more and more divided among partisan lines. In a time of war, it is gravely important that we find a way to settle our differences and work together to achieve common goals. If we cannot, then our way of life is surely doomed.
Tony Spadaccia is a freshman political science and business management major.
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