And it happens again.  More violence.  More hate.

My Twitter timeline and Facebook Newsfeed are full of stories of people acting like animals.  Messages and posts of how this group or that class or these people are taking away from us.  How “we” need to be against “them,” or they hate women, guns, law and order.  It’s full of “Cop-on-Black-Violence,” Black-on-Black-Violence,” violence in general.  How the gays, the women, the minorities, the Republicans and the Democrats, the Socialists, Iranians, and Russians, the old white men and do-nothing youth, all of them are trying to take this country away from everyone else.

Except they’re not.  And, what’s more, we all know that.

We are all tired of this 24-hour news-cycle inspired tirade of vapid stories.  We are tired of the hate and the vitriol and just how fake all of it is.  We are tired of complaining that the politicians don’t work for us, they work for the millionaires and billionaires.  But that isn’t even true, not really.  They work for a handful of producers, creating a real world version of The Real World.  They are performing for an audience that can no longer maintain the attention span.  The dumbing down of America has reached the point that to keep us engaged we now have a side-show act running for President; a figurehead of fears and dark thoughts we have had in the hidden places of our collective brains.  America’s id running for public office.

We have lost our minds.  We have lost our humanity.  We have become a society that celebrates a lack of knowledge, a lack of science.  We have politicians that state they are not scientists but don’t listen to those that are.  We have press conferences to proudly state how little we spend in education, or how high our student debt is.  We have hearings to decide which books to not read.

When schools take the humanity out of our youth, why are we surprised when they act like animals.  When the only role models they have are thieves and war-mongers, why are we amazed when they resort to violence as the only way to express themselves.  Why use words when fists are louder.  Why paint a picture when yelling is easier to understand.  Why sing when shooting is faster.  We have stolen art and thinking from our society, and now lament that we no longer have reason.

We have a whole year of political furor ahead of us; of slinging, hopefully proverbial, mud from one side to the other.  There will be arguments on both sides, far too few reasoned and thought out, and a belief that the victory of one side spells doom for the country. But the country is already doomed.  We have chosen this path from the comfort of our sofas.

This isn’t a conservative issue, or a liberal problem.  This isn’t a problem for the State or Federal Government.  This is a human problem.  This is a problem we have all made; either by design, or through standing quietly by and allowing it to happen.  Stop consenting to be divided and broken down.  John F. Kennedy said, “What unites us is far greater than what divides us.”  We are humanity, let us dance in the wonder of our own creativity, let us sing the joys of our lives, and paint pictures of our hope.  Let us be human again.

Goodnight, and good luck.