By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
You’ve no doubt heard that old bit of wisdom disguised as a joke, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is obvious, pointing us back to what is elemental to the problem: since it’s too huge to swallow whole, you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Any project, no matter how overwhelming, begins with the first step, followed by the next and the next. Some projects are short-term, some long, but all of them require prioritizing and evaluating, and if we’re going to see them through to completion, we must keep moving forward, even on days when the elephantine proportions of our task dismay us.
In describing the elephant, I’m discounting the current TIME magazine cover featuring Chris Christie, conceived and executed by someone with the corroded self-image of the Mean Girl in your high school homeroom.
And while not ignoring the non-partisan corporatization of our political system, which has all but snuffed out the notion of public service, of statesmanship designed to further the public good, I have no choice but to point to the radicalization of the right-wingers as the elephant-at-large, as defined by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone: “As it works to lock in as many retrograde policies as possible before it finally chooses to either modernize or die, the Republican Party is like a wounded beast: Rarely has it been more dangerous.”
Those of us who read liberal press on the internet have a good picture of what’s going on in the larger world, the environmental movement, the alternative parties, yadda. Those who favor conservative press have a good idea of what’s going on in FAUX News, the fantasies of the paranoid right and the multiple outposts of regional resistance across the nation that would rather fly a confederate flag than the Stars and Bars. Finding a way to take a bite out of so thin a slice of bitter consciousness is going to require a good deal of mature willingness on the part of the left.