The Simple Life

I don't actually think that life was ever simple. Too much hard work goes into it. Still, there are times when I wonder what exactly happened to life as I remember it? Then I look around me and see that it's all still there, we just don't wish to see that, it doesn't fit our online agenda. I've decided that social media is today's Hee Haw TV program complete with all the angst one can muster. In the key of whatever your vocal ability is...sing along with me. "Gloom, despair and agony on me-e! Deep dark depression, excessive misery-y! If it weren't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all! Gloom, despair and agony on me-e-e!" Memba THAT? If I live to be 100, I will never understand how people can watch the same political pundit or Faux News Journalist, or any TV program while doing absolutely nothing but posting angry derogatory tweets indicating how unhappy the poster is with what's being said. Back when we lived the "Simple Life" we used to know how to change the TV channel. AND we had to get up off the couch to do it. No remotes back in the day. Now we seem to be a bunch of Chicken Little's running around proclaiming the sky is falling. How do we know this? Well, we heard/read/saw it on MSNBC or maybe on CNN. Depends on where you get your news. What I KNOW for a FACT we don't get, is anything approaching an education on how government really works. Back in the day when life was simple, we knew, thanks to something we learned in a class called Social Studies, how government worked. We knew that the President's job was to make decisions about what bills to pass. We understood that Congress created those bills. Sometimes to correct a wrong, sometimes at the request of the President, but the Presidential job description NEVER included writing laws. We understood how Constitutional Amendments worked. Of the People, by the People and for the People. This meant that Congress addressed an issue, like Women's voting rights, by passing a bill, which was then sent to the President for signing and on to the states where we the PEOPLE could vote on it. The Bill would have to be ratified by 2/3 of the states before it became an ACTUAL Constitutional Amendment. Now, it appears that people seem to think that all that has to happen is "Tell President Obama not to defend DOMA in court." Yeah, some people really are that uninformed. That's all it takes to resolve the Marriage Equality issue right there. And pigs fly. Right now Marriage Equality is in the hands of individual states. New York State passed it by VOTING into our Legislature people who choose to listen to the will of the PEOPLE. One of our Legislators was seriously religiously conflicted over the issue. He went online to Facebook and Twitter and asked us to tell him what we wanted. He then voted YES. The VOTERS in NYS didn't sit around in Twitter or Facebook lamenting about the wicked GOP/Tea Party standing in the way of "errrything" good. We took our thumbs off our smart phones and introduced them to a voting booth. That allows me to live my Simple Life in a Blue State where We The People count for something.