"The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

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I assume that all people capable of reading a blog are familiar with the cautionary moral story, disguised as a children’s fairy-tale, of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf".


This story came to my mind as I read the recent disclosures by Tom Ridge that terror alerts were used by the Bush Administration for the purpose of political manipulation. This made me quite angry, but not because of indignation regarding political manipulation – that part was by no means unexpected.


No, it was something else that got my ire up. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I spent a few years as an Intelligence Analyst, and the significance in this context is that I know for a fact that there have been, and are, a variety of very real and nasty threats to our security and populace. The irksome part of the above disclosure is that, like all of the other high-decibel hyperbole (and outright fantasy) we’ve been inundated with over the media, the use of exaggeration as a cheap form of manipulation never remains unveiled for long, and its buffoonery has the very real and very dangerous consequence of utterly trivializing the events and concepts which it picks up and twists.


What we end up with is a situation wherein not only the past atrocities of actual tyrants, but also real threats against our own nation, end up being presented as little more than gas-filled balloons twisted into vague abstract representations of cartoon animals at the hands of some creepy clown.


Although there is certainly room for "fun and games" in politics, this sort of trivialization-for-political-gain is a symptom of a serious illness in our political system; serious matters deserve to be treated seriously and respectfully, because they are, in fact, matters of human life and human death. When a society allows those to those become mere props in political circus-acts, it shows a deep-seated illness, a lack of heartfelt respect for Life, is infecting that society.

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