The Pandemic of Politics

Kenn Brody, Broken Symmetry Publishing

April, 2023

 

The business of changing our government leadership happened on a schedule, like football playoffs or tax filings, take your pick.  Outside of that time frame our attentions and donations were applied to other things, such as family life, work and life goals.  This is what we are used to.  This is the regular change of guard in a democratic republic.

 

Not anymore.

 

The virus of politics has invaded every aspect of our lives from what we eat to what kind of car we drive to what words we use.  Do you understand how absurd, how invasive, how unhealthy this is?  Politicians are media gods (small g).  Singers, actors and others are subordinate, angels or demons as they may be inscribed in the political pantheon.  Sex is now a political act between an oppressor and an oppressed, unless you are LGBTQ+, then it’s a furtive act among the oppressed.

 

The political season has grown to include each and every day of the week, all 24 hours, and all 12 months.  You can tell if there is an election is coming by a slight increase in the number and desperation of the calls.  Email, flyers, ads to hurry and contribute your wages to some person’s election.  You know, that person probably makes 5 times your salary and needs your vote, not your money.  What do you think he/she/ze does with your money?  Why, he/she/ze uses it to harass you for more, with more emails, more ads, more ghost-written self-serving memoirs.  It’s a hyperbolic assault on your mental immune system.

 

Do you really welcome this bizarre infection, or do you think, like a bad cold, it will go away?

 

It persists, tainting the world and the words around us, like the faint smell of mold and piss in the subway.

 

Please consider that this is a disease caused by an environmental hazard.  You don’t lick lead paint.  You use repellant to keep mosquito bites down.  You wash you dishes and pots.  Why not sanitize your home and your life against the pandemic of politics?

 

I will not excoriate the media here, even though they are the prime carriers of this infection, like rats in the Plague.  They are also infected.  

 

There is an organism, Toxoplasma gondii, that infects rats.  A healthy rat avoids cats in order to, um, stay healthy.  Once infected with Toxoplasma gondii the rat finds cats attractive, sniffs their urine to find a hungry cat, which, of course, leads to the terminal effect of the virus: munched rat.  The virus now has a cat host that roams around leaving things that can infect more rats.

 

That, in a nutshell, is how the media works.  They are cats.  Hello, Rats!

 

Infected with story line, true or false, the media excretes it en masse..  Their readers absorb it, spread it and come back for more.  A good story has emotional impact.  It is dramatic, triggering.  It gets legs.   There are reactions of the people in the streets, celebrities,  commentators who sprout like weeds from sidewalk cracks.  Maybe there is a reference, a fact that disproves the initial story, but it happens so long after the initial meme-virus that it is hardly noticed at all.

 

One of the effects of this infection is to cripple the brain.  Certain words cannot be uttered.  Some feelings must be swallowed without expression.  The uninfected cannot mingle with the infected for fear of rejection.  This goes so far as to label whole groups of people, states for example, with racial colors, red and blue.  Blue people consider reds as violent tribal subhumans.  Reds consider blues to be stupid lemmings.  No healthy person can see these racial colors at all.

 

Basic sanitation is the best cure for pandemic politics.  Get rid of your TV.  It is the open funnel right into your brain.  Read books, you can put them down when you feel like it and they do not, usually, have commercials.  Rent videos and good movies, not what the TV has on that night.  With the money you save buy a bicycle or invite your real friends over for supper on Friday nights. 

 

If the discussion turns to the latest viral meme, stuff airpods in your ears and listen to music. 

 

A funny thing will happen.  When you get your head out of the TV and political email and get a real life, you will be more interested in real issues instead of personalities.  You will develop a tolerance for ideas that may not be the same as yours.  You will recognize the infected and develop a thick skin against their jibes.

 

Cover your mouth, bite your tongue and stay 6 feet away.