“What’s the Point?”

Have we reached the point in modern times where the prevailing sentiment in response to all sociopolitical circumstance is...what’s the point?

At every turn of the television channel we’re confronted with expert talking heads…pundits, who all claim to represent the truth, to know the facts, to be connected and in the loop. The problem is that there are pundits for every occasion…red state insiders, blue state confidants, aerospace experts, military historians and strategists, medical professionals, executive directors out the ying-yang, and more big toothed bimbo-esque slip and fall attorneys than can be cataloged...and then there is Ann Coulter, the personification of social commentary gone haywire. Not to mention an endless stream of Monday morning quarterback economists who suddenly know why the economy tanked...yet never forewarned anyone.

We live in a world where being inundated by contradictory, maniacal and erroneous information is the norm. How do we normal folk make an informed decision based upon agenda driven (It's ALL agenda driven)propaganda?

And there are more books written by television commentators than there is time in their day. O’Reily spits out books like the octomom spits out litters of hapless newborns, and now Beck has also jumped into the book churning business. I’m not so sure that their books are not ghost written, and I guess it doesn’t really matter because I’ll never read a word from either “author”. What’s disturbing about their message is that it is one dimensional and always crutched by referencing founding fathers and hero’s of history that they themselves can never be…but oh sooo want to be. Not to leave out the left side of the equation, there are the ultra liberal television authors who pale in their efforts to undermine their rightsided competition…names like Franken and Olbermann come to mind.

We have lived through an era where research data from colleges, institutes, and think tanks have become marketable fodder for network and cable “news” organizations. Across time the data has become contradictory to the point of being ludicrous…sunlight causes cancer so stay off the beach, then we find out that sunlight is beneficial to asthmatics…marijuana is an addictive pathway to heroin, now it’s medicinal analgesic…chocolate is bad for your teeth and waistline, now it’s full of antioxidants that flatter the brain and ward off cancer…beer was a waist expanding brain cell killer, now it’s good for the cardiovascular system…and LSD is now thought to help severe alcoholics cope with withdrawal (man, how screwed up do you have to be where LSD can flatter your condition?!)…and of course we can all remember when sex was safe and skydiving was dangerous.

So, what’s the point of trying to make sense of today’s hyper-rich environment of contradictory and insane data…well, I guess it boils down to having little other choice. We all must put one foot in front of the other no matter how difficult or unflattering the circumstance, so we make decisions that affect our welfare and happiness based upon consuming and digesting information from the most dubious of sources, all offering the paradoxical condition of being consistently inconsistent.

What was the point of this article? More on that later.