Getting Real

Sarah Palin visits Richland! Wow! I might drive the 100 miles to go to her booksigning. Kind of funny when you think about it. If President Obama showed up in the empty lot across the street from my house I wouldn’t cross the street to see him. My dog would bark from the front window. But to see Sarah Palin, 100 miles is not too far.

This polarization of our society is very interesting. It is best reflected in an LA Times book review of her Going Rogue. The author of the review, Andrew Malcom does a great job of making an incredibly important point. He begins his book review talking about Palin’s life and history. He refers to her family life, her political life, and her strong moral compass. He talks about her difficult and trying 2008 campaign. Then he finally admits that he has yet to open the book to read it.

The amazing thing that he points out is that everyone is already convinced of what is in her book. Conservatives will tell you that it is down home, simple but profound in its portrayal of her bedrock beliefs. Liberals will tell you it is a compilation of clichés, “golly gee’s” and “you betcha’s” ; 413 pages of “conservative pop garbage”.

All of this says something really important about our society. We are all too busy to know the details. Malcom’s book review is great for his not having read it. It is also very profound in that no one cares if he read it. We just don’t want to be bogged down by the details of anything anymore. We have already made up our minds.

Malcom has exposed a very dangerous transition that our society has made. And those who understand that transition have done better in politics that those who still fight against it. Who would have thought that any President could send 1,300 pages of a spending bill to Congress, the largest spending bill in the history of our country, and get it passed without any Congressman or Senator actually bothering to read or understand what was in it and not receive the immediate wrath of the people for doing it? We need to understand what that means. We need to think about the implications of who we have become as a society. Are we so numb that we don’t care about the details of real life anymore? To make matter worse the Senate is about to pass a Healthcare Bill that makes no sense. Harry Reid gives us the summary:  It will cost us less, save taxes.and provide better health care coverage.  No need to read the contents, just vote yes.  There is a great amount of opposition to it by people who want to read the content.  But the understanding is that if the Senate passes it anyway, before the end of the year we will morph back into the we-don’t-really-care-about-details mode by next November.

I hope we do care. I hope we come alive and stay alive. We need to get real and not allow others the responsibility of our lives. What is printed behind the title page of the book or the bill really does matter. We are too quick to allow someone else to tell us what all these things really mean, not realizing that the person talking to us has an agenda to disguise the truth. The book, the bill, the Bible, . . . we end up trusting what other people tell us without opening them up to see for ourselves.

Sarah Palin's book is about her quest to get real.  She discovered that she could not trust the "good old boys" even the ones in her party to look out for her interests.  You may not like her as a person or a potential candidate, but to her, Going Rogue means reading the fine print, making up your own mind and not blindly going along with what others want you to believe.