We are stuck in the spin cycle of politics. Our political laundry almost never leaves the machine, but just spins and spins. We throw up, repeatedly, and are simply fed motion sickness pills like candy to try to neutralize the effects. We have bruises on all sides from being tossed endlessly about.
Yet the occasional left sock does escape. Like the man who stuck his head and arms outside of the carnival ride, the sock only escapes partially. It is decapitated! We find its head over by the snowcone concessions. But its body remains trapped in the machine, spilling its guts and innards around making the nausea even worse.
One such escapee looks to be marriage equality. It is rapidly making its way out of the machine, yet for the right wing it will continue to act as a source of discomfort and discombobulation for at least the next few cycles. Another issue, which hasn’t escaped, is firearm access for the disturbed. But it still agitates the people trapped in the machine, continually popping off high-powered rounds giving the people much fear.
And yet while the whole broken machine spins out of control, we find ourselves fighting over winning. Winning means we dictate the direction of the spinning. Clockwise or anticlockwise. We don’t control the speed directly, and if we had balance the machine would stop spinning, but we’ve been Stockholmed by the spinning, thinking this machine must spin. We’re the fish that don’t know they live in a water vortex, or the blind ants following one another in a spiral of death called an ant mill.
When the direction reverses, the spinning does stop briefly. That tiny moment of relief stays with us, thinking that we’re still in it, that the effects of the spinning will finally wear off if we can hold this direction for just another few years.
Why does the machine spin? Most of us just get tossed around, but some of us believe fervently that it should always spin one way. They are hamsters in this machine of ours, running to spin the machine in their direction. Over time there are shifts in the spinners. Some of them fall down, die, others change sides or take a break.
But the spinmeisters and spin doctors have a side bet going, in the form of large corporate interests, about which way the machine spins. They want it to spin faster and faster in the way that wins them their little bets. They don’t know or care they could make more money if the machine just stopped spinning. Because, again, they’ve been entranced by the spin. The whirring machine is a Siren’s song, the vibration of the belt’s friction against the drum is like a car engine puttering their infantile minds to sleep at night.
Kids grow up running the direction of their parents, sometimes switching sides to oppose their parents, or follow their religion’s rotational values, or they like a pet idea or two of one direction over another. But the directions have nothing to do with any of that. A socialist society could pay less taxes than a libertarian society. A conservative society could lower military spending versus a liberal one.
Like with smoking, where people smoke for the psychoactives and die from the particulates, our society is spinning for decisions that could be achieved without the spinning.