Poised to Panic

If you’re an observer of the American landscape, you probably know that Proposition 19 failed in California. If you aren’t, Proposition 19 sought to legalize marijuana, thereby allowing its legal cultivation, distribution and sale.

But what interests me isn’t whether it passed of failed, but how it failed.

Borrowing a page from the conservative playbook, the opposition employed the panic strategy. Television ads featured stoned school bus drivers and nurses showing up to work with employers helpless to do anything about it!

Wow. That hits all the right panic buttons, doesn’t it? Children at risk, intoxicated nurses and employers rendered mute by (gasp) big government.

And people bought it. As usual, the reality is one-hundred-eighty degrees removed from these Chicken Little, the-sky-is-falling scenarios.

The image of employers forced to watch helplessly as their drug-addled employees wreck havoc in the workplace belongs on Saturday Night Live, not in considered political debate.

Have any of the voters swayed by this argument ever looked at their employee handbook? The truth is that owing to ‘at will’ employment, employers can pretty much fire you for anything: Your socks don’t match. Ravioli is spelled with one ‘l’. It’s Thursday.

So. How did voters connect this argument to reality? The fact is, they didn’t. They reacted to it. With abject, unthinking, underwear-soiling fear.

We’ve seen this before. Most notably in the 2004 presidential election, in which Republicans convinced housewives that Muslim terrorists were everywhere, just waiting for an opportune moment to send aircraft plowing into cul-de-sacs from Tacoma to Tallahassee.

From weather bulletins bordering on hysteria to amber alerts, we are a society perpetually on the edge of panic. Overloaded and over-stimulated by media and communications, we are ideal targets for button pushing (and button pushers.)

I wonder what it will make us vote for next.

This, That and the Other Thing

I don’t remember my dreams. Apart from providing a haunting metaphor, it’s also true. I could be in bed scaling the summit of sexual ecstasy with Megan Fox and I wouldn’t recall it. It’s sleep-induced amnesia.

But last night was different. Not surprisingly, I dreamt of work. I was in a meeting room, seated at a conference table. I was new to the company. The air was thick with stress. Every time the faceless leader said something, a different co-worker leaned over and whispered something bitter and contradictory in my ear.

The meeting was grid-locked. The harder management pressed for resolution, the more staunch the employee opposition. Yet when the leader called for a vote, the vote was unanimous. It was disturbing; I felt trapped by the employee’s public agreement and their private dissent.

It's the usual propaganda about speaking freely and the unwritten rules about never, ever doing so. Work in a nutshell. A head-on collision of colliding contradictions.

Then there’s the Christmas Day terrorist fiasco over Detroit. Republicans have seized it as another opportunity to plant the seeds of fear in our always-receptive soil. Democrats can only issue a wobbly, off-target response about it being proof that ‘the system works’.

If you say so.

Lost in the fumbling and the fear-mongering is the fact the kid didn’t board the plane in the United States! But by all means, let’s re-invent the wheel. When we’re done running around shrieking, I mean.

I’m in complete agreement with a recent Time magazine cover story calling this the worst decade ever. It certainly is the worst I’ve experienced. I’ll be the first in line to give this decade (and this year) a good, hard kick in the ass tonight. Good fucking riddance!

And Happy fucking New Year's to you all. We need it.