Viral living

So, I was reading Salon yesterday on my lunch break at work and came across a newsbrief there about March Together for Life (be warned the images are gruesome), a pro-life blog. The blogger, Pete, wrote a blog entry about an article in The Onion where a woman wrote about being "totally psyched" about getting an abortion and murdering her baby. Pete didn't realize that the article was, of course, satire. And that it was written in 1999. Within a week, the web has been abuzz about this.

There is even an article about the whole drama on wikipedia.

The comment threads on salon are hilarious. But what does this say about our viral society? We've become a society that spends so much energy living on the net and communicating via email and blogs that people can't recognize satire and sarcasm or even communicate effectively.

The original poster, Pete, may have been searching the internet for articles to back-up his POV, but it is amusing that so much "NEWS" and commentary has been spun out of this. It is so much easier to lash out at people when we don't talk to them face-to-face.

Still more bad news

I was reading the Times this morning and came across this article about the simple civics lesson on how goverment is supposed to work and how it isn't under our current leadership.

The article is about the Deficit Reduction Act that was signed into law in February. This is the law that cut funding for Medicare and College Student Loans (while at the same time, Our Leaders cut taxes for the VERY wealthy). It turns out that the bills past by the House and Senate were different, and instead of have to go into committee to combine the differences and re-vote, Dennis Hastert signed a letter stating that the bills were the same. The original vote in the Senate was a tie and Dick Cheney had to break the tie. The original House version past by two votes. It seems to prevent a defeat of the new bill, Dennis Hastert just signed a statement saying they were the same. This goes against everything I learned in 6th grade about how our government works.

Remember, at the same time Dennis Hastert was earmarking money for highway development in Illinois to raise his personal real estate holdings. Is this what our country has come to? We can spend tax dollars to enrich lawmakers, cut taxes for the very wealthy, but force cuts in funding for student loans and Medicare without following basics laws of governing in this country. And, of course, all of this during a time of war that we aren't even funding.......