selling the fear

i was preparing to empty the wastebasket in my room...a receptacle that fills through the week with the mail that does not need to be addressed, filed, or shredded...when i saw this sticking out of the detritus...

and i thought to myself "these people are gaslighting me"...placing the onus for the failure to utilize their product on me rather than the fact that their product might not, a) meet my needs ( and these days needs are outdoing desire,mostly, not for economic reasons, but more from an age induced shift from the kinetic to the katestemastic ) or, b) is either utterly pretentious or completely shoddy...advertising ( whether it is political or commercial ) is pretty much fear based...if i don't do this, buy that, or vote this way i will be behaving in a socially reprehensible fashion while the real failure, in the advertisers' eyes, lies in my not engaging in a transaction with their product/political view...my last two posts have both been about politics here having become completely fear based...whether it is peolsi wailing about the horrors of a second trump administration or donny whining to his base because he sees doom in a fair election...both are trying to drag me down into their camp by playing to fears which leaves me thinking that all they are actually interested in is staying in office/power because it is a paying gig and strokes their massive egos all at once...it also leads me to believe there will be nothing much in terms of substantive change to the system...they see discontents as vehicles to office, not as issues to be addressed..business as usual is the agenda and part of the agenda is keeping the polity balkanized by pandering ( publicly at least ) to the interests of sub-groups as opposed to policies that might benefit the mass as a whole...such as finding the "political will" to do something serious about climate change rather than deny it ( although i think it is probably too late..that window has closed ) or finding an immigration policy that humanely deals with the mass of climate refuges that await beyond fortifying the borders and letting people die trying to cross the sonoran desert ( official policy since clinton )...this might be too much to hope for..it has been so far...so let's do some alterations that more honestly reflect what hegemonic culture is really saying...