This year Negros WEEKLY celebrates 24 years and Negros NOW Daily is four years old. I’m a newcomer to both, and resident on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, yet, I feel like a member of a close-knit but scattered family and look forward to scanning the pages of both regularly to keep up with what’s happening.
Local and regional newspapers are often overlooked when the media and its impact on society are discussed, but they have always been the life blood of communities. It’s in news organs such as these that people see themselves and read about the things that truly matter to them.
Over the past several decades there has been a decline in local and regional media in many parts of the world, and the so-called main stream media is owned by the ultra-rich who are more worried about protecting their wealth than objectively informing the public.
Thank goodness for papers like Negros WEEKLY and Negros NOW Daily that labor in the trenches telling the stories of the lives of real people and allowing them to see themselves and people like them.
Kudos to the staff for all the good things you do and here’s wishing you many, many more years.
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There’s an old saying, ‘politics is the last refuge of scoundrels. My observations over the years leads me to believe that this is one of those old adages that nails it right on the head.
Not, mind you, that all politicians are scoundrels or are complete scoundrels. But, a disturbing percentage are, unfortunately, scoundrels through and through. And, they’re not all that bright to boot.
Over the sixty years and having lived and worked in over ten countries around the globe, I’ve had the chance to watch politics and politicians in action, and the scurrilous things I’ve seen them do and the terrible things I’ve heard them say are absolutely mind boggling.
This year’s election in my home country, the U.S.A., though, has been a veritable graduate course in understanding just how low politicians can go in their pursuit of power.
Take the two politicians who amplified a false rumor about immigrants in one of our midwestern cities eating people’s pets. Even after city and state officials debunked the bogus claim, one of them just added to it while the other told a TV interviewer he thought it was okay to ‘tell a story’ if it achieved his political aim.
In the meantime, the immigrants, who were not illegal as both of these charlatans claimed, were not the only ones to suffer from this vicious falsehood. The town’s government, schools, and other institutions received bomb threats, and regular social activity almost ground to a halt.
Then, there was the other politician who, after Hurricane Helene brought death and destruction to a wide swath of the southeast, posted on line that the hurricane was ‘created’ by the opposite party to hurt the voters of her party. This same politician in the recent past claimed that space lasers were responsible for a lot of the aberrant weather the globe has been experiencing.
In another incident, a politician in a western state, in a debate with a politician from the opposing party who happened to be a Native American from one of the local tribes, told her she should ‘go back where she came from.’
I wish I could say these are the only weird things I’ve observed just this election season alone, but they’re not. I could fill a 300-page book with the shenanigans of politicians this year, here in the U.S. and around the world. All done in the quest for power and with no regard to the welfare even of the voters they’re courting.
It’s enough to sour one on the political process, and while I disagree with them, I can understand those people who just refuse to become involved. I too am now a complete skeptic and trust few politicians of any stripe.
I refuse to succumb, though. Despite my skepticism, I will still vote in every election. I will endeavor to identify the least harmful—and hopefully in some cases the most helpful—politician on the ballot and for that person I’ll cast my vote. I wonder, though, about those people who still turn out and vote for the politicians I’ve mentioned in previous paragraphs. Is this a case, perhaps, of scoundrels voting for their fellow scoundrels? | NWI
