Although those words are eerily reminiscent of what I remember being told numerous times throughout my childhood, my heart no longer jumps at the mere presence of the words “What’s going on here?” In fact, I think I’ve come to appreciate them in a new way; they don’t always mean that you’re in trouble, but can also signal genuine confusion over something that has happened unexpectedly.

Occasionally I manage to pull my head out of the sand and take a look at the world around me, not just here at Gustavus, but also regionally, nationally and internationally, not for the purpose of anything in particular, but to glimpse upon the “real world” I will inherit too quickly in life. I consider it a kind of masochistic act, because never will you read about the ‘real world’ and feel intense joy about everything that’s going on. In fact, I think I try to avoid it not because I love living in blissful ignorance, but outside of the particular details, the state of affairs in generally always the same. I don’t mean to bore you with my own take on life, but my point is that upon getting my news fix, I usually feel a little disheartened and if I do care about what I read, I feel worried about the future, rather than particularly ecstatic like all those elementary songs we sing to children tell.

But this last time I got around to survey the world I am a member of, I felt something entirely new: total confusion. I found myself saying “What’s going on here?” both in the sense that I am clueless as to what’s been happening, but that something is so clearly wrong that it seems the world outside of the everyday is somehow farcical, almost comically so.  As a people, we’ve always found things to be upset about, things to go to war with, people who need helping and people who need our help but we ignore.  Mistakenly thinking that I knew roughly the rules and trends governing  how we as a people act, I thought that all the things I see as utterly outlandish would stay within certain predictable trends—but I was wrong.

Now, rather than summarize all the news articles I found that left me flabbergasted, I would rather point out that something has changed that has reduced our news cycle from the ridiculous to the absurd. I remember when news came from the smooth and authoritative voices, and the reporting had succinct facts and logical, reasonable presentation.  Those loud outspoken voices that originally only were watched for their shock value appear now to be the norm, and it frightens me.

People like Glenn Beck, who just yell loudly and vigorously point at things while labeling everything with emotive language and sweating profusely, make every day seem like it just might be the start of Armageddon. Why do they act like that? Why are they still on the air? Why do the American people eat out of the palms of those irrational, falsifying, hypocritical fear-mongers?

If it were merely the trend of increasingly polarizing media that I saw, I would be just upset, and not confused. I’m confused by how integrated and normal it is now to be emulating this kind of behavior. Let’s take examples to show you what I mean.

First, we have the health care bill in Congress.  We always have a congress that acts slowly. I’m all for deliberation and can understand why it takes so long to get a budget passed.  But they’ve been at this for a long time, and all they have to show for it is some measly scrap of the original ideal that has passed the Senate. What troubles me is how divisive a topic it has become: on one hand you have the party of “no” and on the other you have a unilaterally acting majority.

The purpose of having a congress is not so that the majority power can push its agenda into law, yet both parties organize themselves as if they need at least partisan filibuster-proof majorities to accomplish anything.

In our own state, we run in to similar issues.  I won’t pretend to know all the details and history behind the most recent health care bill, but I do know that our congress worked very hard and across the aisle to have a law that would extend healthcare coverage to some of the poorest among us.

That didn’t stop King Veto from rejecting it (from his desk in Washington) and proposing some bogus alternative that would not only cost more but cover fewer people.  This was just a day before he blatantly rejected the idea of all people being equal under the law, saying: “No more giving Miranda rights to terrorists in our country.”  Now it might feel good to agree with him, but it’s just this kind of remark that exemplifies how, if we had any just principles in the first place, we are dangerously close to losing them.  And I won’t mention his defense of this ludicrous new “tea party movement,” which is too absurd to comment on.

This is longer than my usual commentary, and it is so because I am so passionately confused about the direction that real world we occasionally peer into is going. It frightens me because of its reality, and it disheartens me because we have the potential to be so much better. I remain confused because I feel powerless to change it. What can I do to change the world I am at best one seven-billionth of? Beyond petty local acts of demonstration, what kind of change can we affect when we look upon our world and understand that it’s broken?