Hyperbole and Then Some

I know I'm as guilty of this as the next person, so it is a little hypocritical to complain, but have you noticed how it seems like so many people use negative hyperbole when something doesn't work?

For example, I have a friend who is having problems with the game application conglomerate Steam. She wanted one game and she can't seem to get Steam to download or install it. The result is a steady stream of Facebook posts about how much Steam sucks, that it is awful, its support is horrible, etc. I interjected that it is normally a pretty solid application and game installs can involve a lot of variables. But she's having nothing to do with that. In the end, the fact that both myself and many of my friends use Steam without trouble or incident is ignored and the entire company, at this point, "sucks" because she's having trouble.

A similar instance happened this weekend. A group of friends got together. Most (all? not sure) use Chrome to connect to a specific website we use to game together. One friend was using Chrome and had issues; he could connect to the site but couldn't get the audio features to work correctly. Soon we were reading a steady stream of how much Chrome sucks, how bad it is, and other venting... even though the rest of us had no real issues with connection or our audio/video setup. In his defense, each time we connect as a group, one of us seems to have an issue -- this was just his turn, it seemed. What's more funny is that when it is my turn having issues with the connection, everyone jokes that it is "just John" and how I always seem to have trouble-- when really I have only had a couple of instances, they just tend to be more memorable than others.

As I watch the news, the same thing is happening in our leadership and around the world; one person has an issue with something or someone that everyone else seems to be getting along with, yet that one person dominates the news cycle with his/her opinions. Or the news conflates one person doing something to some sort of "why didn't this other person/group do more" question that doesn't apply and is not applicable. For example, when a shooting makes the headlines, no one stops to related how low gun-crime statistics actually are per capita; they rarely mention that there are frequently multiple and sometimes up to double-digit laws already in place that could have and should have been enforced, which would have solved the issue; they seem to rarely mention that in many of these cases, warning signs were ignored and/or the police or other authorities were involved earlier and were unable to do anything to stop the violence from happening before it bubbled over; they rarely mention the huge rise of knife violence happening in "gun-free" countries like China and other Asian countries, where there have been a number of incidences of people taking knives and going on rampages and killing and injuring multiple to dozens of people. Instead, the news media usually jumps on the "ban guns" bandwagon yet again. They rarely mention that in many of these cases, the guns were obtained illegally and that banning the law-abiding citizens (who are rarely in the news for gun violence reasons) from following the law and obtaining guns won't stop people from continuing to get firearms illegally.

Look at our lawmakers: for the past five and a half years, John Boehner's cronies in the Republican party have been doing their best Chicken Little impersonation about any bill or idea put forth by President Obama or anyone in the Democrat party. They keep hammering their ideals and what they believe has happened no matter how mountainous the evidence to the contrary. If these few people keep telling us something long enough, they think we'll believe it. It is like they do not realize that what they say and what they do is recorded, or that the American people will have the means by which to review those recordings in the future and call them on their poor decisions, outright lies, and general obfuscations. Even when caught, and shown the evidence that they said one thing and then did the opposite, or that the one thing they said was outright wrong, they try to spin it like that isn't what actually happened. How much longer can the American people stand for this to happen, or the constant inaction that has come from it, before voting these people out of office?

At some point, we each have to take responsibility for ourselves and stop blaming "the other." My friend with the Steam app issue may want to stop blaming the company and the app and realize it is likely some setting in her PC that is causing this issue. Thousands of others use Steam daily without these issues and hundreds have likely used Steam support without a hassle. Chrome may not be as much to blame as, say, the website itself or my friend's personal PC setup in connecting to it. Maybe the guns aren't so much to blame as the person who wants to commit the violent act. Maybe our lawmakers should look in the mirror at who is to blame for the government's ineffectiveness, rather than trying to blame the other party, the President, or some other force. Maybe we all need to start saying, "I have an issue, how can I resolve it?" rather than, "They are the problem, how can I screw them the most for it?"