It is too easy to buy into the trash talk liberally sprinkled about this planet.

With access to an abundance of online platforms, all those thoughts, ideals, posts and propaganda discounting or documenting the evil ways of one faction or another are far too available on social or mainstream media.

It has become acceptable.

We are force-fed ideologies, dogma, practices and policies from politicians and posers (generally one in the same) preaching not just a better way, but the only way; their way; the right way (and it is oh-so-wrong). It is a world of scintillating sound bites and malicious headlines that don’t make sense.

It’s too easy to accept the bullshit that continues to pile up on the shiny floors of government or along the protester-lined main streets. It’s difficult to determine what really matters once caught up in this foolish chatter.

It has become too easy for politicians to stray from the business of guiding the country and getting caught up in the highly publicized displays of arrogance and shameless self-promotion. In their need to offer rhetoric instead of real truth, our leaders (no longer a meaningful term) slough off their intended roles.

A politician’s tradition role is to tend to the affairs of our nations, managing economies, propping up currency markets, and sorting through developing social issues, health care concerns, protection of the citizenry, and legislating the laws of the land.

It is their job, and they are paid to do it. Yet they don’t.

Shame on them!

No: shame on us. We allowed all of this to happen.

We bought into it, and continue to do so. It is served to us on silver platters, or sucked up from silver spoons. We have become trained to accept the politics of negativity. Instead of being allowed to embrace the principles of democracy offered and allowed in developed nations, we let those elected officials waste our precious time and resources on this damned one-upmanship we have allowed to prosper.

It is an abuse of power. Politics is no longer about party representation, or reinforcing and advancing the rights of the people. It is now, only and solely, a blood sport. We have just witnessed the conventions of the two major U.S. parties in an election year. Neither party has emerged from the respective gatherings as unified.

Unity, it seems, is no longer a platform for either party. Unity has become less of a concern for anybody.

We allowed it to happen. No, it hasn’t been an immediate thing. It has taken decades, and it began long before one American president began talking about a kinder, gentler nation. Over time, this top-down propensity for greed and power has accelerated to the point where it has forcibly entered our own very lives.

We have come to accept that this unabashed ignorance is a socially acceptable way of behaving. We are led by example. Too many of us are too quick to point out what is wrong with the way somebody lives or loves, instead of accepting the diversity of color, faith, sexual orientation or gender identity now openly available to us.

We have allowed video-game violence to become ethos instead of entertainment. It has become me against you, or them. Right now it is easier to say, “what the fuck is this whack-a-do talking about” than it is to consider that I may have a point.

It is more convenient to criticize a concept or lambaste an original idea than it is to find fault in questionable authority.

It has become easier to say ‘oh well’ than it is to ask ‘why’.