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Perhaps I ought to begin by admitting that I abhor politics and politicians. That said, my perspective is colored by all those same factors that color your views: my age (and the memory of what seemed like better times); my education (B.A. in English and a J.D.); and my personal history (I have worked since the age of twelve, I have survived serious illness, and I have achieved a modicum of professional success).
If one is alive in contemporary America, the so-called issues of the day bombard one daily. It is easy to get caught up in what I call faux issues: the economy; the war(s); political posturing. These are not real issues because they are, unhappily, fundamental elements of our life, before, now, and ever after. The economy goes from bad to worse and back again all the time and has been doing that all of our lives; our history includes one war after another; and politics is always the same: shallow, self-promoting, egoistic, pompous asses living off the rest of us.
The real issues are what I believe is driving contemporary disgust:
- The civil society that we remember from our youth has disappeared and been replaced by strident polarization. Different interest groups push their often dubious agendas and it has become politically incorrect to even suggest they ought to shut the hell up and crawl back down their rat hole.
- We are inundated constantly by a relentless torrent of data (and I use this word – data – in its most negative sense) from the Internet, on computers and handheld tech devices including even “phones.†Our lives are trivialized by these phenomena.
- The media has replaced the educational system as the “learning†mechanism du jour. As teaching in the classic sense was lost to the pressure of such contemporary programs as No Child Left Behind, the study of the old-fashioned Three Rs (readin’ & ‘ritin’ & ‘rithmetic) was replaced by the Big E (electronic devices). The intellectual void was filled by the media, thriving upon all the idiocies and irrelevancies of our day, from the cult of celebrity to the deterioration of our language and our ability to think for ourselves.
So here I sit, an old man with old views. I have become my grandfather, except that I am spending three dollars a gallon for gas instead of thirty cents. But now, as then, one of the few delights of advanced years is the curmudgeonly satisfaction of complaining about how crappy things have become.
- even though I was urged to try by my children - I was terrified of it) 
In the end, I was more or less 'forced' to out of necessity (Yay - I manged to spell that word correctly - that is a 'first')
