Beyond Outrage Fatigue

Not many posts on politics lately (or many posts at all, for that matter). My heart just isn't in it. It's not that there aren't things to get worked up about. Instead, it's that there are simply too many things to get worked up about.

There's an added dimension here, too, I think. It's easier to let slip the dogs of outrage when one believes that the system has some kind of self-correcting mechanism; in other words, it's easy to be outraged when one believes that others share your outrage and that that shared outrage can have some (positive) effect. But at this point, it's just not possible for me to think that. Indeed, given that things seem to be going south so quickly, on so many fronts, the most disturbing thing is how little of this gets through "the media filter." Maybe I'm wrong, and things aren't as bad as they seem to me: widespread political corruption; unchecked executive power; rampant human rights abuses by our government; the growing gap b/w haves and have-nots; massive structural deficits; wars and rumors of wars; looming ecological catastrophes. Maybe there are positives out there. But when the leading story of the last week-plus is the vice president (accidentally) shooting a man in the face . . . despite everything else going on, that's the story. Admittedly, it's a great story, from a media perspective. But one would think that the media has a greater responsibility than covering "man bites dog," missing white women, and so on.

So, I'm sure I'll get fired up for the coming political season. Sometime soon.