The Politics Monster

Sometimes I feel like we're completely disconnected from the candidates we vote for (or don't vote for, but who win anyway), from events of national and international importance, from the decisions made in our names and for our "security." I feel like there is a separate universe in which the politicians and powerbrokers and media figures live, remote and removed from the reality of our everyday lives. The politicians, media, and powerful rich bigwigs have helped create this insulated separate world; I think they must enjoy living what are for the most part consequence-free lives of leisure and plane trips and big banquets and photo ops. Sure, occasionally someone gets caught in his or her excesses; every once in a while, the blind squirrel finds (and indicts) the nut. But for the most part, this universe is untouched by justice, by equity, by the hand of the common man or woman.

But the people in this other universe know nothing of our world, nor do they want to know. This alternate world, in which the power and the money are concentrated, is like a giant monster that can no longer be controlled or contained; it doesn't even know we exist:

See that tiny little black dot under the monster up there? That's us. You and me. We are as a speck of dust to this monster. The way this separate monster universe is set up, we have no impact on the monster, no matter how loud we scream or how hard we try to poke the monster and get its attention.

The rest of the world sees only this monster when it looks at us; the rest of the world, and indeed a small number of us, only see how it tortures, how it lies, how it exploits, how it shits on everything it touches. People in other countries can't see us, you and me, after all. They only see what their monster-controlled media lets them see.

We pretend to live in a democracy, but the monster chooses our candidates. The monster gets its loyal footsoldiers to control who "wins" elections. One man pretends to be king, pretends to be running this monster, bullying our representatives in Congress and telling them what laws to pass or what trade agreements to approve. One man pretends the monster speaks for all of us when he approves torture, decides what countries to invade, or throws trillions of dollars of our money to his pals. The monster chews up everything it sees; it has no conscience, no sense of restraint, no knowledge of finances and budgets.

Those things are for ordinary people to worry about. The monster can't be bothered.