Pointing out a problem isn’t ‘politicizing’ it [View all]

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By Sid Schwab


Megyn “Benghazi!” Kelly, of Fox “Benghazi!” “news” would like you to know that people who “politicize” the Amtrak crash in Philadelphia are “despicable.” By which she means those who've pointed out the disasters waiting to happen as our infrastructure putresces from years of neglect. By which I mean the suicidal Republican obsession with budget cuts in order to pay for tax breaks for their wealthy benefactors. Oops. Did I politicize?

Crazy times. You can't discuss obvious racial disparities without being accused of “playing the race card” or being “divisive.” You can't react to the latest (nearly daily) incidence of a child finding an unattended gun and shooting someone without being characterized as a gun-confiscator. (Can we stop calling those events accidents, by the way?) And now you can't point to the irrational path down which Republican economic policies are dragging us without being tagged as a despicable politicizer.

Question: How do you discuss the results of political policy without “politicization?”

In an earlier column I mentioned poverty, listing some approaches I consider doomed to failure. Because I'm not brilliant enough to have ideas of my own, I didn't propose any. Yet I heard from people who reFoxively accused me of tax-and-spend liberalism, despite the fact that I'd mentioned nothing of the sort. Because considering problems government ought to address implies money might need to be spent, programmed outrage results as if by a rubber hammer on the patellar tendon. Question the carefully maintained construct that we can get along just fine by ignoring all problems that require monetary outlay, and expect responses on a par with that which results from pointing out the science behind anthropogenic climate change, or the real age of the earth: changing the subject, obfuscation, or “la la la, I can't hear you.”

It began with Ronald Reagan, of course: the idea that government is the problem, that tax cuts magically solve everything, that we can have what we need without paying for it, that privatizing everything but the use of our pudenda is the path to paradise. It's not. Or, in the case of infrastructure, that we can just pretend it away. It's the perfect message for a nation given to rationalizing hard stuff out of existence, banning expert testimony, even, as per the governor of Florida, disallowing the use of certain sciencey words. Who wouldn't want to believe that by paying less in taxes there would be nights of prosperity and days of jubilee? Show me where and when, and I'm on my way.

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http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150610/OPINION04/150619976