I'm not sayin'...I'm just sayin'.
You see, a big piece of why I'm so sick of the political atmosphere in this country has to do with the seemingly constant stream of individuals and groups playing the victim card. Honestly, it's like a giant playground where everybody is still in pre-school. But where I come from, nobody likes a tattle tale. I mean, I never would have guessed that people would want to play the victim card. It just doesn't seem to be beneficial.
Whenever I watch the news, I hear about terrible things happening in the world which I as an American am not affected by. Genocide, religious intolerance, racism - these are things I do not have to encounter in my day to day because of the life I was born into. Yet almost constantly I hear rich, powerful, usually white politicians and commentators claiming to be victims simply because someone called them a name or misrepresented their beliefs. It all seems quite over the top to me. I guess what I'm saying is this: conservatives aren't victims; children growing up in war-torn Iraq are. American Christians aren't victims; those giving their lives to living their faith in China are. Sarah Palin isn't a victim; those affected by the tragedy in Norway are. Al Gore isn't a victim, but everyone who had to sit through An Inconvenient Truth is.
Okay, while that last one might be a bit of a stretch, the larger point still stands. It seems like it has become not only acceptable but fashionable to claim victimization in our nation's current political environment. I don't care what your politics are, it happens on both sides of the spectrum. Nancy Pelosi does it, Sheila Jackson-Lee does it, Allen West does it, Fox News does it, and so on. And every time I hear it, it makes me cringe.
I don't expect the victim-claims to go away anytime soon, and I don't expect anyone to ever admit that their rhetoric might have gone a little overboard. That's the America we live in now. But I guess I keep coming back to the fact that even while it seems that our politicians do whatever they can to rub me the wrong way, there is always hope that tomorrow things might start to get better. Will they? Probably not. But I'll always hold onto that hope.
And so on...
