Is it me or do kids these days only pay attention to the world if they think the sky is falling? In MY day we didn’t really have a choice – only three to five channels and Dad was watching the Five O’ Clock news no matter what. Not sure which of us had it better, but we Boomers grew up having some idea of what was in the news.

Nowadays, everything is a crisis.

Only it’s not. Most of the crises aren’t even urgent and a few aren’t even real.

The danger is that people start thinking that if it isn’t a crisis, it’s not important. The opposite is true. A crisis is something you are just reacting to because it’s too late to be proactive. I suppose it’s still important enough but now you’re bailing water instead of just plugging a leak.

There are plenty of important things and most don’t require your immediate action. You don’t need to write your congressman every time there’s a spending bill – you can but boy are you gonna be busy doing it! Sometimes you need to write your congressman and sometimes you just need to vote for someone else next election.

Knowing who to vote for or even which party to vote for involves knowing what goes on in the political space. Otherwise, you’re mimicking, not voting.

I know, grown up is so hard.

I listen to a lot of different commentators – part of the being a commentator myself thing. Some are kinda sad. They aren’t bad commentators but man, are they ever convinced that government is a conspiracy against them and that everything is going wrong.

I’ve heard a couple who normally comment on the war in Ukraine on the military side express disappointment and fear about the new Speaker of the House as if his election is going to end aid to Ukraine. These are guys that know their stuff on the military side but think the entire Republican party is against aid to Ukraine.

Hint: it’s not.

Now, they aren’t wrong to be concerned. Speaker Johnson comes from the most skeptical faction of the Republican party but most of his objections seem to be predicated on the procedural way the House handles aid packages.

You just fell asleep, didn’t you?

Wake up! This is exactly what I mean. Power is in the BORING stuff. Congress can issue edicts all it likes but only when it spends money do those edict do anything. Congress’ real power is in the hideously boring world of finances.

How those bills are handled is a problem. Congress has gotten way too comfortable using omnibus bills. Now, these are nothing new but they are getting ridiculous. Without a line item veto – look it up! – the President can’t do anything about the parts of bills on his desk. He can only sign them or veto the whole thing. Vetoing the entire annual budget is politically insane because all those government employees, military servicemen, and contractors of all sorts get really upset when they think they aren’t going to get paid. Plus everyone else gets mad because they expect government services to be interrupted.

Congress sends these ginormous omnibus bills to the President loaded with political pork that he has little choice but sign. Sometimes they are egregious enough that the President threatens a veto before the bill ever leaves Congress. This threatens one of those ‘government shutdowns’ you’ve heard so much about so there’s a bunch of negotiating at the last possible moment to end up with a slightly less crappy budget.

Those scary conservatives like Johnson want the budget broken up into more manageable – and transparent – smaller bills that Congress will have to pass separately. If Johnson would like to remain Speaker, he will be seeing to it that bills show up in manageable sizes. So while it makes political sense to the pro-Ukraine folks to link Ukraine aid to Israel aid, it’s not politically palatable for Johnson. That doesn’t actually tell us much but the fact that so many Republicans support Ukraine means it’s extremely unlikely that Johnson will prevent all new aid bills. The majority of Republicans can pull the same stunt that the minority did and Johnson knows it.

Boring is where the power is.

What does this have to do with paying attention to the political world? Everything. No matter how good the expert, they cannot get you up to speed in a two minute interview. The twenty minute video is better for a quickie overview, but nothing takes the place of a half hour a day consuming political information. The easy way is watching the news three days a week and watching videos on event topics the other four. Sign up for an email newspaper or two to get a quick rundown of the day’s topics.

Sounds rather too easy, huh? A bit, perhaps, but simply exposing yourself to a trusted variety of sources gets you much better informed than you might imagine. You will start to retain more over time and when someone mentions that conflict between Hungary and the EU you’ll have an idea of what they are talking about.

You have no clue there even is a conflict, do you? There is. It’ll come back to bite down the road. It’s not critically important today. And no, I’m not telling you what it is. I will tell you Hungary is an EU member but more than that, you do your homework, young man!

How do I know that conflict isn’t critically important? Seriously? You haven’t watched any news in years, have you? There’s a little invasion by Russia in Ukraine and Israel is going off the deep end following the massacre on October 7th. The EU isn’t shooting at anyone, least of all a member state. It’ll be fine, probably.

But, peace process!

What are you talking about? The Arab/Israeli peace process is what got us in this mess. The two state solution is officially an abject failure and most Middle Eastern nation states are just praying this mess blows over as soon as Israel gets finished in Gaza. The usual hemming and hawing is barely having an effect – Israel is PISSED. The only nation state you should be less eager to PO than the US is Israel. Those guys do NOT play.

But, CNN said…

Talking heads on legacy media are barely journalists, let alone good sources. CNN would be better off if they could convince Wolf Blitzer to crawl under another table somewhere. You’re too young for that one, huh? Look up the Persian Gulf War – Blitzer was in Baghdad when the Nighthawks started bombing the place. Personally, I think crawling under the table was the sensible thing – what was he going to cover in the middle of the night anyway?

Yeah, CNN once did real reporting. Most of you were in diapers back then. Man, I’m getting old.

Regardless, there isn’t a ‘way forward’ after Hamas massacred 1400 civilians and frankly, the US doesn’t care anymore. Peter Zeihan (you’ve heard of him if you’ve been on YouTube in the last year) is quite correct that the US has no further real interest in the region. But it’s more than that. US citizens were caught up in the massacre as victims and hostages. Israel gets first crack but they are NOT the only ones that are PO’d.

Congrats, Hamas, on POing the two most dangerous enemies on the planet. This will not end well for you.

Or Gaza. There’s no fixing it. There’s no way to get a ceasefire. There’s no way to negotiate. How ready to ‘negotiate’ were we on September 12, 2001? Heck, it was 2005 before we sort of calmed down.

Those of you thinking sure, but you’re an expert, no, I’m not. Foreign policy/international relations were never my interests. I just have a good foundation and the know how to get the information I don’t already have. Anyone can do the fairly basic analysis I am doing here. I’m not drawing off expertise – just common sense and a solid knowledge of the conflict. I had to go get a good bit of the latter.

This is that We the People thing in action. We govern our government but we can’t do that if we don’t know how the silly thing works or what’s going on in the world. In a little more than a year you’ll be going to the polls to decide who will run the most powerful nation on Earth for four years. That’s a much bigger responsibility than most people understand. But before then, you’ll have opportunity to discuss events online and to message your congressman. That’s the most basic part of our political world and it has powerful ramifications.

Stop burying yourself under the covers. You’re a grown up now so start doing the grown up thing.

It’s important.

The Middle East isn’t the same as it was in the 1990’s both in inclination and capability. Most of them know it. So no, the Middle East is no longer some powder keg waiting to explode nor does it have the capability to actually start a regional conflict with just Israel, let alone Israel with US backing. Nope, no world ending cataclysm but a whole lot of real people getting really badly hurt and getting really, really dead. That’s enough to make the massacre of Israelis and the war it started important.

Like I said, no easy way out and nothing that used to work stands a chance now. Can you fix it? No. Pay attention anyway. The fighting will stop. Israel will eventually calm down. In the meantime, America has to decide not only how it will react now (hint: not well) and what we’re going to do going forward. Do we help with humanitarian aid for the decade or more it may take? Do we turn out backs on the Gazans because they should have known better than elect Hamas?

Do we as the sole superpower try to make things better or let them get worse?

Oh yes, worse is always an option. It’s the option the Arabs have gone for every time they had the chance for the last 75 plus years. As bad as this is about to get, I think there may just be a glimmer of hope. But it’s up to the Arabs as to whether they wanna keep trying to destroy Israel and be destroyed by Israel or just accept the loss and try to find something better in life.

The US can’t choose for them but we can make the latter choice a bit easier to bear. That’s a lot of work and it won’t be easy, or quick. Alternatively, we can just take our superpower ball and go home.

The choice begins with We the People – and that includes you.