Chris Jepson: Reflect

You get what you reflect. Oh, this doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to bad things happening to good people, I’m describing your daily walk-around demeanor. What you project typically is what you receive.

Two considerations come to mind with my modest maxim. That of the mirror, which reveals the outward, and that which you are – reflecting what is within.

Coco Chanel suggested you get the face, at age 50, you deserve. I’m inclined to believe that—a bit—as I think if you’re pinched on the inside, it’s challenging not to wear a face equally withered. Although the word façade easily comes to mind.

What you reflect? Reflect is an interesting word. It has multiple definitions, but for this column consider these two: mirror and to think seriously. Two meanings at almost polar opposites.

I am amazed at the number of Americans who, by their own admission, do not read a mix of newspapers, magazines, journals or literature. Who do not read, period. Many, if not a majority of Americans, rely on television for their news. Many who occupy the Right spectrum of politics, rather the Right Side of Stupid, gather their ignorance at the trough of FOX News or through talk radio wingnuts such Rush Limbaugh.

Glen Beck is the appropriate example of the Propeller-Beanie-Hat Tea Party patriot. He has thousands of loyal adherents who willingly, nay, eagerly gulp down the Kool-Aid of rightwing apocalyptic drivel. Actually, some pay money by subscribing to Beck’s rants that America is on the slippery slope to commie socialism, Obamacare is SatanCare and every sperm is sacred. Beck’s conspiracies abound, that they (insidious Liberal rats) are coming for your guns but only after requiring your daughters to abort while renouncing God. I’m shocked.

Shocked that anyone subscribes to such drivel. But, hey, free speech. That is truly one of the great things about America. You’re free to be as inanely simplistic (see: Ted Cruz) as you want to be. Go ahead and reflect the nonsense you hear from FOX and Limbaugh. For instance, you’re free to parrot the Tea Party line that America defaulting (even temporarily) on its debt is an appropriate way of expressing displeasure with government. So what the cost of borrowing goes up for the nation (individuals, corporations, government).

We all have a choice. You can reflect the banal, simplistic slogans that rally the unthinking Right or perchance, to actually seriously think (reflect).

One Republican is actually doing that. Thinking. And, weighing his odds at re-election. New York Times writer Trip Gabriel recently interviewed Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That if you’re poor, somehow your shiftless and lazy,” observed Kasich before asking, “You know what? The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.” I would add, have you refused your Medicare insurance or returned your Social Security payments?

This is what I do not understand about the Right. “X” percentage of our fellow citizens, for any number of legitimate reasons, cannot sustain themselves on their own. This includes children, elderly, sick, disabled veterans and the mentally challenged. If “X” is 10 percent, that, at a minimum, is 31 million Americans. That is equivalent to the entire state populations of New York and Pennsylvania. What exactly, as a nation, do we collectively do to address that challenge? As important, what do we intelligently try (public policy) to actually reduce the percentage?

I suggest, for starters, we reflect.