Tea or Treat?

I told my roommate she should be Sarah Palin for Halloween. All I had thought about were the black glasses my roommate has that are similar to Palin’s; I guess I was thinking about their similar face structures too. But the rest of the women in our house vetoed my idea. “She’d be shunned,” they said.

I hadn’t even thought about the ramifications of impersonating Palin for Halloween, but it’s true—if I saw Palin walking down the street with a bag of candy on her arm, my first instinct would be to throw a cup of tea in her face.

Palin upsets me because she is trying to solve crucial problems by focusing on who holds political offices. Changing the colors of office from blue to red is not solving problems—it’s avoiding them. Spending billions of dollars on campaigning for offices does not help the economy or our education system.

In our polarized age, if anything has a hint of the opposing party’s color in it, we purge it from the system. This polarization scares me—we aren’t thinking as individuals, but as collective zombies. Halloween is once a year, not every day.

This week, NPR fired analyst Juan Williams because he made an inappropriate comment about Muslims. AS NPR CEO Vivian Schiller stated, it is up to good journalism to be objective, and Williams had failed to do this.

Following this action, Fox news hired Williams for $2 million dollars and accused NPR of limiting freedom of speech. Palin and others have now targeted NPR, claiming it to be “liberal programming,” and claiming taxpayers should not need to pay for something they don’t agree with.

Ridding the country of public broadcasting is not going to lower taxes or solve internal problems.

Naming our shortcomings and taking ownership of our problems is a start—we can’t blame other countries, immigrants, broadcasting and the environment anymore.