AUGUST 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Hobson’s choice? Take it or leave it? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t? You really can’t escape. Reject one of the two opposing political labels the media has infected us with and you become the other by default. Label #1: heartless, greedy bastard. Label #2: short-term feel good, long-term just plain stupid.

Logic vs. Emotions. Not really new. Leaning one way or the other was always the dividing line in human temperament. But what happens when one ideology drags the whole body politic down their slippery slope? What happens when all the agents of information and communication dominate with the same partisan narrative, the same partisan agendas year in and year out? It didn’t happen overnight. 

Starting in the 60s when a lot more of it was justified, the radical Left quickly usurped the media and slowly hijacked the culture. Decade by decade, generation by generation, wokeness vilified the fundamental American meritocracy as cruel and exclusionary. Again, not new. But what was new was the mesmerizing power of expanding media. Political correctness kept anyone from pumping the brakes on that slippery slope of emotionally-driven content. Good ol’ decent compassion and empathy, caring, kindness, love – how could it not win the debate? Didn’t our mothers raise us with a conscience? Sounded wonderful. And like frosting on cupcakes, entertainment culture delivered the calories. Norman Lear, Hollywood, ads and commercials, the allure of an idealistic youth culture on campuses, protest music, college indoctrination factories spawning too many alums who went from the Halls of Ivy to the Halls of Congress or state and local politics with no real work experience or even real-world experience. We mistook the largesse paid for by the Greatest Generation as a legacy of leisure. Sadly, it often devolved into drugs, dissipation and anti-establishment hatred dressed out as a moral mandate to live and be kept like innocent children. “If it feels good, do it.” It was all earned, pre-paid, deed and entitlement, bequeathed to us by that Greatest Generation in their blood and tears, the one that survived two world wars and a Depression so that we’d have a better life, leisure time, shorter work weeks, womb to tomb social safety nets. Unstoppable “progress,” we thought.

But everything stops. The Universe runs down like a clock. Entropy. Inertia. Even a slippery slope bottoms out, if only to start swinging again like a pendulum. Eventually emotions – anti-logic – became so profoundly illogical, so radical, that even the most rabid and misguided bleeding hearts began to balk. That’s where we are today. It’s hard to condemn caring, love or giving as excessive. But if some is good, more is not always better. Water and air are essential…until you are drowning or perishing in a hurricane. 

Thus, Orwellian doublespeak became doublethink and hysteria turned common sense inside out until the tide ebbed and flowed and ebbed again between 2016 and 2025. Propaganda is fierce. And the pillars of American meritocracy – hard work, law and order, rewards for success, et al – are still being demonized. We are fighting a war of language and interpretation as much as substance, complicated now by AI and social media. Examples: allowing tax cuts to expire are called tax hikes by outraged conservatives, while requiring able-bodied recipients of Medicaid who don’t have dependents to work minimum hours are called cuts by outraged liberals. Meanwhile, social programs are built on the antithesis of merit, entertainment thrives on moral dogma, and the salaries of firebrands and talking heads flow from ratings. The reek of polluted politics continues to replace the pure oxygen of individualism, independence and incentives. Whether you focus on a seething hate for crudely blunt Donald Trump or not, a backlash from the Right resulted in his upset victory in 2016 and, despite political weaponization wall to wall against him, the stark contrast with a 4-year backslide to the Left under Biden-Harris got him elected again.

The reins of power all tether to the same race horses. Put your money on…money. Spend it. Spin it. Spill it. And spill it we have. Often portrayed as fairness, equality, justice vs hard work, discipline, common sense, we face a huge reckoning just around the corner as insolvency looms. If the Republican strategy to postpone it by growing the economy doesn’t work, the doomed binging of Democrat socialists will land us in bankruptcy sooner than predicted. In either case, it’s a pyramid scheme. We’ve literally grown fat and lazy. Poverty is now characterized by obesity. Nuclear families spread apart like free radicals. Stress, anxiety and a plethora of mental illnesses manifest in all manner of aberrant crimes and addictions. Can we take the medicine? If there is a way back, it will come with social discipline and reclaiming the meritocracy.

So, how do you measure up? No easy answer, given the issue-by-issue clamor across media. Here’s an easy political yardstick to start you out, though. It’s simplistic. Something for everyone. You can sub in your sacred cows, of course. But if you balkanize it, you end up with the same ramble-scramble polarization niches that keep us from coming together now. That said, it isn’t a list of answers. Just personal inventory questions that could possibly help you see where you are on the map. Or better yet, find the map itself:

If you’re a woman, have you been taught to hate your femininity? If you’re a young male, have you been taught to hate your sex? If you’re white, have you been taught to hate your race? If you’re openly Christian, have you been taught to hate your religion?

Answer “yes” to any of those questions, and you take a step toward understanding how society became mired in media-culture hysteria. Will it get better if we reach the point of such absurdity that we can’t define crime or heroes or borders or even genders? Oh. Yeah. We’re there. Well…see you at the polls.

Just my honest perspectives herein. I respect your right to radically different views on your Timeline. No partisan rants invited here, please.

Photos: some oldies. Also some really old oldies! Photos #1-2 the lassie and lad who will represent me in eternity (my children Colleen & Sean); #3-4 little red wagon photos regressing from Colleen/Sean in living color to still living but fading to b/w me (Treesqueak) and my adopted cousin (Wampus) just before she bit my finger (she really did); #5 another b/w photo, but this one all about reds – me and my Irish setter Red and a little girl whose actual name I don’t remember because we called her “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan