April 28th, 2012.

The system works.  Ish.  There are posters all over Carrboro, NC about fracking – not the good Battlestar frakking, but you know, hydraulic fracking.  Mining.  It’s been in the news a lot recently.  Surely you’ve heard of it?  Of course you have – now I’ll stop calling you Shirley…

People have been louder about it in some places than others, but the news stories generally aren’t too good.  It’s sort of like most environmental science: the industries who are actually DOING the deeds (mostly energy companies whose primary concern is digging stuff up and burning the caloric value out of it) can always turn up an expert or three that will deny everything that everyone else in the entire scientific community agrees upon, but generally there’s a consensus.  In the case of fracking there’s debate as to whether or not carcinogens are being successfully recaptured or whether they’re being pumped into the drinking water – but they’ve just reached consensus that we’re causing minor(ish) earthquakes. 

And that’s all over the news.  The people who CONTROL the industry, whether that’s the people with the political power or the industry individuals with the money – or whether you believe those are even two separate groups – would probably really like that fact to disappear.  They’d probably like a lot of the negative information about fracking to conveniently vanish – but the system works.  Journalists Love breaking stories and bad news is GREAT news and the news community, though it may be somewhat polluted with a desire for ratings, generally keeps digging and bringing these things to the surface.

All puns intended.

And so I have very little faith in the grand conspiracy theories.  9/11 was an inside job?  We faked the Moon landing?  Obama’s birth certificate was forged?  Chem trails!  New world order!  All of those delicious stories that find their excitable fringe worshippers –

I’m sorry, people just can’t keep their mouths THAT sealed (oh yeah, of course that’s why we’ve heard of them!) – no, with the slavering maws of the world news organizations craving dirt and a scoop on their competitors, things with an ounce of truth to them are investigated and inspected and chewed up and spat out… Sure there are secrets out there, and there’s plenty of corruption, but the idea that the big secrets will keep forever’s kind of absurd.  Tell a secret to your 10 closest friends.  People can’t keep their mouths shut – and that’s WITHOUT trained journalists cajoling and bribing and sniffing and poking…

Now what do we DO with that information?  That’s where the system DOESN’T work.

Public broadcast television is in danger of losing funding again – but for different reasons than in the past.  Public television / radio was originally envisioned as a sure way to get (relatively) non-partisan, non-ad-influenced, neutral(ish) information to the masses.  It was supposed to provide a ubiquitous source of education to an electorate that needed to be informed about the world so as to make knowledgeable decisions when it came to selecting their representatives.  But THIS system’s failing.  As less and less people tune in and instead choose to pay for their information filters of choice, it really becomes more about controlling said filters – and that truly IS simply about money.  Whether it’s cable television or internet blogs or ad-supported talk radio, people have almost universally turned their ears and eyes from the publicly provided resources – I read a statistic recently that less than 3% of the country tunes into national public television broadcasting.  It’s not doing the job it set out to do and is potentially hopelessly outmoded.

Information about the environment, about fracking, about stretched statistics and enthusiastically massaged poll numbers and where the money comes from and where the money goes – it’s all out there, and clicking on three or four mainstream sources can bring most of that information to your screen sans too much effort and sans too much political filter – but people aren’t tuning in.  The Washington Post for the leftishness and the Washington Times for the rightiness…  the New York Times and a couple of AP-supplied radio news sites and you really CAN have a pretty solid view of the world.  But only if you bother.

People will call me ignorant but look at your sources, where the ad revenue comes from, where THEIR campaign contributions go – it’s not THAT hard to look into.  But people don’t care.  We’re in a world where it’s too easy to solidify your opinions by surrounding yourself by like voices… it’s too easy to block out the rest.  There’s no sanity anymore and the electorate seems to be reaching further and further into ignorance for the sake of being reassured about their own world views.  It’s a whole lot easier than being challenged.

There’s a lot of shit wrong with both parties.  I long for a third party that’s not merely an extreme version of either Democrat or Republican but that’s generally moderate and sitting in the middle – but sense will NEVER be an easy 140 character headline and headlines just don’t convince… they can only reinforce.  A shout can’t ever win an argument, only start one.

The only true distinction I can draw which helps me in my OWN limited political choices is that the Democrats seem to universally support education and the dissemination of information and the Republicans seem to universally support obfuscation and playing things close to the chest and for getting their fingers into truly personal choices.  Not to even imply that I’m touching hot-button issues but one party’s for making your own informed decisions, and the other party’s for taking away your multiple choice…

And no matter how much I might agree with certain ideas and concepts, I can’t vote for someone who’s going to FORCE those ideas and concepts on the rest of the country.

The information is out there… and I have the critical thinking tools to track it down and make use of it.  I have the education to form an opinion and express it intelligently – to write letters to congress or to my friends and family.  And I just can’t help but think that kids in the public school system today aren’t receiving the same toolkit that I received from the same system 25 years ago – and that there’s an awful lot of argument toward ripping that system further asunder.  It’s a shame – because the system works, but we’ve got to be educated enough to use it, and the system is dying.