David McElroy

Where did you stand on the great Etch-a-Sketch controversy last week? Were you with Team Romney, which started the controversy with an ill-designed metaphor? Or were you with Team Santorum or Team Gingrich, which went on the attack by putting Etch-a-Sketch toys into the hands of their candidates to wave around on stage?

Or were you like the media and the pundits? Were you so busy gorging yourself on various forms of the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor — from every angle — that you pounced on any morsel that might sound like a new perspective on the goofy line?

Or were you more like me? I was vaguely aware of a very stupid controversy, but I pretty much ignored it — because it meant absolutely nothing.

The Etch-a-Sketch story is the latest example of something I’ve seen for more than 20 years. When you’re inside politics, you can tend to assume — without ever consciously deciding to — that people outside the political bubble care just as much as you do about the trivia inside that bubble. I was reminded of that Tuesday because of a short story in the Washington Post. A reporter from the Post seemed surprised that a poll shows that 55 percent of people never even heard of the whole Etch-a-Sketch silliness last week.

My experience is that most people inside of politics honestly think that the things they’re talking about are on the minds and lips of intelligent people everywhere. They believe that what they do is so Important — with a capital I — that everyone must know and care about it. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just an attitude that you pick up among them. They believe — on some level — that people care about the subtleties of the political arguments they’re in the middle of with their opponents. The idea that most people don’t even care about a tempest in a teapot such as the Etch-a-Sketch episode would suggest that maybe what they spend all day doing isn’t as important as what they believe — and they can’t handle that.

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Here are a few of the random things on my mind…

If you choose to live somewhere that a natural disaster is more likely to destroy your house, who should pay extra for that risk? You or people who choose to live in safer areas?

Along the Alabama Gulf Coast — and I’m sure other states of the Gulf Coast — insurance rates have been skyrocketing because of a couple of very expensive recent hurricanes. Insurance companies were hit with huge costs, so they now judge those places to be higher risks, driving up premiums. Not only that, but some companies are not selling insurance for those areas any more, because they believe the risk is too great for the potential profit. That makes sense, right?

Well, many of the people there are angry about the higher premiums and reduced competition. They want the government to force people in the rest of the state to pay higher rates in order to allow their rates to be lower. In other words, they want those of us in places such as Birmingham — who don’t face hurricane risks — to subsidize the choice they make to live in a risky place.

Why? They want something for nothing. They want to choose to live in a place with higher costs, but they want someone else to pay for it. Sometimes it seems that most of politics today is about one group trying to figure out ways to get someone else to pay for what they want.

Have you ever wondered why so many highways and bridges and government-owned buildings are named for politicians? It’s bad enough when things are named for those who were supposed to be great leaders, but it’s even worse when random things are named for politicians who have no claim to fame. I was driving today along John Hawkins Parkway (known as Alabama 150 to those of us who haven’t adopted the state’s new name) when this question hit me.

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There was a time when I was mostly worried about politicians lying to me. These days, I’m just as afraid of the vicious lies from political activists. The ones who know they’re lying are bad enough, but the really scary ones are those who are so full of hatred that they have no room for nuance — or even truth.

Truth can be a nebulous concept to an angry person. For someone who is filled with rage and is convinced that the other side — whichever that “other side” might be — consists of evil people, anything is justified as long as he strikes out at those enemies. If he lies a little in spreading his message, well, the other sides is even worse about that. Besides, since it’s the only way to get people to listen to the ultimate truth, a little lying is justified to get their attention.

You can’t just give a reasoned opinion today if you want to be heard. You have to scream. You have to be angry. You have to demonize the people who disagree with you. If you try to be reasonable and understand why different people see the world in ways that are different from your ways, the truth is that your voice is going to get lost in the crowd. It’s going to take a lot longer to be heard. It’s a lot more work and there are fewer immediate rewards.

So many people who write and speak to the world politically take short cuts. They lie when it suits their needs. They don’t worry about little things such as fairness. They don’t worry about holding themselves to a higher standard than they expect of “the enemy.” And they scream their message to a willing audience that’s angry, too, and will amplify the message by way of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media tools.

In my Twitter feed this morning was a link to an article headlined, “Obama Signs Bill That Ends Free Speech.” This was either another deception or I’d missed the biggest story to come out lately, so I went to check. Here’s the link for you to read the story yourself. I defy you to find any fair and honest way to come up with that headline from anything the story says. Even though the new law might be bad, it very definitely doesn’t end free speech. It’s on a website for a very conservative group with Christian roots, so I’d like to think that the concept of truth means something to them, but it clearly doesn’t. As with almost everybody else, they’re shouting and sensationalizing in order to be heard.

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