Bjcorbin's Blog

There once was a little girl named Angie, whose parents divorced when she was three. She lived with her mother most of the time, though on holidays and weekends, she’d bounce between her mother (Monica) and her father (Ted). Both parents made a place for her in their homes and all of her needs were cared for; but as Angie got older, she found that wasn’t really enough for her. Though both of her parents lived on a tight budget, she developed a taste for the finer things in life and somehow rationalized that she was entitled to them. Even at a young age, she recognized that the best way to get what she wanted was to turn one parent against the other and to stir up their insecurities, competitiveness, guilt, fear, pride… She found that when they got focused on each other, they’d tend to lose sight of her and her agenda.

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Like the time when she was eight and her mom told her to turn off her favorite show because it was bedtime. She simply told her mom that her father had said that when she turned twelve, she could choose to live with him and that then she wouldn’t have such an early bedtime. This of course infuriated Monica, who immediately went into the bedroom to call Ted. Angie smiled as she heard her mother’s muffled yelling through the door, while she finished watching her show.

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A couple of years later, when she was ten and wanted a cell-phone, both parents told her that she didn’t need a phone and that they really couldn’t afford it. So one day she told her father that Monica had said that he’d better not get her a cell-phone or that she would take it away. This stirred Ted’s anger; after all, who was Monica to tell him what he could and couldn’t do. That very night he took Angie to get a phone and he sneered as they got in the car saying, “I dare your mom to take this away from you!” Angie just sat quietly, beaming and nodding in agreement.

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Then there was the time, when she was fourteen and money was missing from her mother’s dresser drawer. Monica knew it had to have been Angie, but when she confronted her, she said that her father had told her that his child support checks should be going directly to her and that she should just go get “her money” from her mother’s drawer. Again, Monica flew into a rage and called Ted immediately. Despite his vehement denials, she refused to believe anything he said. After hanging up on him, she cried on Angie’s shoulder, telling her how rotten Ted had always been to her. Angie spent the rest of the evening consoling her mother and no mention of the money was ever made again.

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There are a thousand other examples I could give, but you get the idea. Chances are that you know a family like this; in fact, you may even be a family like this. But if you are a friend of Ted and/or Monica, you probably just want to shake them and say, “Don’t you see what Angie’s doing to you to – don’t let her distract you from what she’s doing.” If you can relate to that, then you can probably understand how it feels to watch my Republican/Conservative/Right Winged friends, neighbors and family, battling with my Democrat/Liberal/Left Winged friends, neighbors and family, over all things political. The polarization of the American public during the last three presidential election cycles has reached epic proportions, with a steady stream of anger and accusation raging through every conceivable forum (e.g. Facebook, the editorial page, the blogosphere…). As a person who’s never been willing to get into bed with either, I will say that these folks are like Ted and Monica in this story; and our elected officials have become like little Angie.

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The reality is that our elected government officials have steadily leveraged their position over the last few decades so that it has become very lucrative to be in “public service” and sadly, their votes are too often reserved for the highest bidder. Those bidders are generally driven by wealthy lobbyist groups, whose voice seems to resonate much louder than that of the general public. As the state of the average family in America continues to steadily decline, our elected officials have become wonderfully insulated from the impact of their own decisions. They will not suffer the affects of bankrupting the Social Security system, or driving the Medicare program into the ground, or from the huge budget deficits that most states are now facing; nor will they have to worry about how the health care system weathers their efforts to reform it. They have become like a large company of high priced consultants, who produce little more than rhetorical gains; and yet if they were evaluated in the same way a private sector company is, we’d have to admit that this organization is highly inefficient, top heavy, over priced, unproductive, unreliable and severely over-budget. In many ways they are like a brokerage firm, who we’ve entrusted to invest our hard earned (tax) dollars; but given their performance would anyone seriously invest with such a company. Yet in spite of their blatant manipulation of the process and their obvious failure to produce worthwhile results, they seem immune from genuine accountability. Just like little Angie in the story, they’ve found that all they need to do is stir up some dialogue between the left and right; and in the ensuing chaos their indiscretions and inefficiencies are soon forgotten.

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If we could see ourselves in this little analogy, we would also be able to see that Ted and Monica need to quit taking the bait. Its past time for them to stop blaming each other for what Angie is willfully initiating. If by some amazing stroke of foresight they could catch the wisdom of setting aside their differences long enough to deal with this child, she would have no choice but to change her tactic. If they’re not able to grasp that vision, it’s likely that they’ll one day be raising their grandkids, paying off Angie’s student loans and blaming each other for all their misery.

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America has always been made up of a diverse mix of viewpoints, so the fact that we don’t all agree on what is best is nothing new. The problem comes when our system of government becomes disconnected from the people it is supposed to represent and is allowed to run without any real accountability. As near as I can tell, the checking and savings accounts are dry and little Angie has her parent’s credit cards at the mall. Ted and Monica can get on the phone (or Facebook, or on their blog…) and blame each other, or they can go after this spoiled child.  If they choose the former, they just need to remember that when the bills come, they won’t be addressed to Angie.