Mis-Politics

When I was a child, in the midst of various news broadcasts that carried news of war in what I was told was my home country, I developed a complete and utter aversion to politics. I basically thought anything political was evil and to be ignored. As I grew into a pseudo-activist university student, inserting myself in the world outside my school walls, I began to re-think that long-held opinion and realized I needed to learn more about what was going on in the world of politics. At that point, I began to idealistically consider politics and its tactics as clever, unarmed strategies for socio-political change (as university students would).

Now, many years later, I’m beginning to think that my first opinion as a 4-year old was actually more on the dot. Politics are evil. Or, perhaps I should be fair to the academic and intellectual world of politics and specify that politics as is now being practiced on the world stage is more akin to mis-politics, and is malicious at the very least, if not outright evil.

Our current mis-politics are no longer unarmed, and far from clever. Or perhaps I have become a little smarter. How does that saying go? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me… Shame on us indeed. The tactics are too obvious, the deals are too cheap, and our lives do not hang in the balance, they plainly don’t count for anything.
How did we become so devalued? And how did the standards of admission to this group of ‘world leaders’ become so skewed as to plummet so far down the negative scale?

If you’ve been following mid-east politics, then you would not be wrong in assuming that this little rant is influenced by yesterday’s events – a car bomb in Beirut and shelling in Gaza. All to commemorate Bush’s trip to the region, where he comes with gifts of arms deals or the like in exchange for, what else, leverage. Can't understand how he expects to solve anything by bringing MORE arms into the region. And this leverage, love it - leverage that helps sweep some of these pesky regional problems under the carpet so that he can exit his presidential term with a seemingly neat slate, which his successor will trip over. What’s more, they will trip over us. Again.

How pathetic… when will we ever learn…