I have held back and bitten my tongue to the point where I believe I am going to need a tourniquet.

Where will I stir up the hornets nest first? Hmmm.

And looking at that last sentence it reads as if I am enjoying this, relishing in an expected outburst of opposing views.

I am not. I would rather move on down the road talking about anything other than politics, equal rights, the bombing and destruction of the Middle East. I really would, but today that isn’t going to happen.

Across the Atlantic in the Middle East a huge conflagration continues as it has for the past few millenia. Syria is basically a pile of rubble at this point what with its government bombing the populace, the Islamic State bombing what they can, that the rest of the world trying to eliminate IS by bombing everything else. The result being half of Syria becoming refugees and flooding Europe. In Iraq the Sunni and Shiite are still fighting one another as they have for millenia and continue to divide that country…drawing lines in the sand with blood.

Sigh. And today I read a comment about how the Obama administration is doing nothing to combat IS. As if IS has a central base where we could drop a bomb and take them out. When in reality IS is a conglomeration of every terrorist group in the Middle East. Only carpet bombing every single square inch of the region would “take care of the problem”.

Yeah. Genocide. It is always the way to go, now isn’t it?

And then what do you do with all of the refugees? We have a battle raging between all of the people running for their parties nomination for the office of President. Some are saying that we need to deport the millions of people who have come to the US illegally. Build a war to keep them out. And then this morning I heard a politician say we have an obligation to take in the refugees from Syria.

Wait. What?

Deport one group of people, and take in another. How does that play out?

Sort of like a Kentucky County Clerk refusing to issue marriage licenses and being jailed for failure to follow the law. Of course, she personally feels that because of her religion she shouldn’t have to follow the law. There is a lot of support for both sides of that argument. Where do I stand on this? I think that she got was hoping that she was going to fly  under the radar with her stand. I really don’t believe that this civil servant had no desire to be the center of a media firestorm. I firmly believe that all of us want to fly under the radar….don’t attract too much, or any attention to the things we do and don’t do. I firmly believe that this woman got caught in the Charybdis of her religious beliefs and the parameters of her job. And it bit her in the ass.

And lets talk about the media for just a minute. When did reporting the news become making the news? Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC all of these networks have reporters, commentators, stringers, and independent sources that they pull from for their news reports. The sad part is that instead of “news” being reported I keep getting the feeling that we are being fed “the next sensational thing”.

I miss Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley.

Damn I am old.

From police shootings, to black lives matter, to all lives matter, to flags, heritage, gun control and everything else in-between. We are fed a slanted view that is bound to get people fired up about one point of view or another. We are fed sound bites and memes. No one had the time or the desire to actually research topics. It is all a dangerous and toxic mix.

And it is all pretty typical of the lead in to an election cycle. Context, folks. Context.

There is always a reason to the way information is slanted. Either to pick up support, or to discredit the other side.

Context.