According to a recent YouTube post from Jamelle Bouie, the lurking elephant in the room is a seemingly deep-seated opinion—belief?—that all politicians are liars. Two-faced, self-interested, more often subscribed to CYA than being honest with the people who have voted them into office.
Talk about being caught between a rock and hard place.
If this is indeed the way many of us feel, then we can’t hold out much hope for reaching or returning to a place where we feel confident about anything being done to address legitimate concerns.
Of course, another way of looking at things is that most of us can smell a rat when there’s one around. We are realistic and clear-eyed and perceptive enough to tell the difference between a scoundrel and someone who has a good heart and takes their job seriously. As Bouie asserts, we know that Presidents and Senators and Representatives and mayors and governors and school board members and solicitors may offer up shades of the truth from time to time. But we pin our hopes on most of those who we elect to be decent people who aren’t on some mission to line their own pockets and burn the place down. At least that’s what I’d like to believe.
Still, if distrust and suspicion are as deep-seated as some say they are, then it’s no wonder we’ve ended up with the cast of characters currently running rough-shod all over D.C. and the rest of the country. To enough of us, it’s a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Apparently, enough of us are OK with a steady diet of lies and excuses and deterioration, because they perceive the opposition as somehow being worse.
