Although the current news is John Boehner and the House GOP caving on the two-month extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, the major difference between the left and the right has to do with another type of cave, such as the one in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The right is captured and chained by their dark ideologies, primarily fundamentalist religion and ruthless capitalism, to see only the shadows of reality, and those ugly shadows are readily provided by witting and unwitting members of Fox News and the Mighty GOP Media Machine which ceaselessly work to make day into night and love into hate. It’s a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that has served the wealthy ‘Keepers of the Flame’ and their puppets well as they intentionally deceive their audience, some of whom are otherwise decent human beings, into thinking the twisted and misshapen shadows they’ve been taught to accept as reality are not just the dark echoes of dead ideas, mostly unworkable or cruel. Of course, these ‘flame-keepers’ are individuals and corporations who make enormous profits from bamboozling the public into voting for their hand-picked shadow candidates. Despite this, more and more people, as a matter of necessity, are throwing off their self-imposed shackles and crawling toward the light, as evidenced by the surfeit of polls showing the majority of Americans agree with the goals and ideas of the progressives. The Republican ‘shadow-show’ has nearly run its course — silly ephemera like ire at Obama shopping at Pet Smart with his dog, or what kind of holiday greeting some miserable low-paid clerk at a Big Box store uses, isn’t going to put a dime in anyone’s pocket except the fabulists who obsess on such baloney to avoid talking about the stark reality revealed by the sun outside the cave, with shafts of light now penetrating even its deepest recesses. BTW, it sounds like Orson Welles narrating the first video below that explains the allegory.
And, as a bonus, ten quotes from Socrates: