Where is the Outrage?

​One million people including thousands of children are trapped in Aleppo. Scavenging food from garbage dumps. Burning tires to create a smokescreen against Russian airstrikes—and creating a deadly atmosphere in their own lungs. Starving, dying of preventable or curable diseases and injuries. Both Syrian government forces and rebel forces prevent these people from leaving the city. They are hostages for both sides, and targets for the Russians and who knows who else.
 
Some numbers and descriptions come from “relief organizations” that have a vested interest in reporting large numbers and horrors. That’s how they get their funding and power.
 
Enough numbers and descriptions come from so many different news sources, however, that there is likely to be considerable truth to this.
 
Where is the outrage? I’ve not found it, and I’ve looked hard.
 
The Syrian Civil War has been going on for about five years. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that over a quarter of a million people have died. Other estimates reach nearly a half-million. The United Nations estimates that the war has created four million refugees, and that nearly eight million people have been “displaced.” That means driven from their homes but still living in Syria. Maybe in Allepo.
 
And what does America do? Our leaders play footsie with the KGB thug who controls the kleptocracy that is the government of Russia. We the People argue about which of the two principal presidential candidates is the biggest liar and thief—without having read either party’s platform. We wonder how long some starlet’s marriage to a man five times her age or to a woman will last. And we drink the signature American beer probably not knowing that Anheuser-Busch has been bought by a foreign company.
 
Trump claims that he will make America great again. Think about this. He’s saying that America was once great (by some undefined standard), that it’s no longer great (by some undefined standard) and that he will make America great, again, by some undefined method. Frankly, that’s lacking in specifics.
 
Clinton is attacked for her arrogance in setting up a private email server, and for things that various conspiracy theorists have dredged up. (I’m not knocking conspiracy theorists, by the way. That’s the way our brain is wired. More on that another time.)
 
Why does Hillary’s chicanery, perfidy, and arrogance not bother me as much as does Trump’s?
 
I’ve said this before: Hillary Clinton is arrogant. Her use of a private email server was not so much about secrets as it was about arrogance. I think she believed she was above the law and beyond the rules. It wasn’t the secrets that may or may not have been released. It was about the arrogance that led her to believe she could get away with it. (And, truth be told, it seems she has.) Further, given Bill’s proclivities, do you really think that during the private meeting on his plane, he and Loretta Lynch just talked?
 
The significant current question relates to the DNC’s undercover campaign against Mr. Sanders, specifically, “what did Hillary know, and when”?
 
Who cares? Who should care? That’s politics as usual. Both sides have been infiltrated by crooks and neither side has a leg to stand on.
 
What we, the electorate, need to do is dig down into the morass of lies and corruption and find what might be the truth. What do the two candidates really believe, and what might they try to do to and for this country—and for themselves—should they be elected?
 
I don’t like Trump (any of them), and I have a hard time finding anything in the Republican Party or his platform that I can support. I don’t like Clinton (any of them), and I have a hard time finding anything in the Democratic Party’s platform that I can support. It’s a sad note when the only reason I have for supporting a candidate is that he or she is the lesser of two evils. I’m learning that I’m not the only person with that problem. And I’m still trying to figure out who is the lesser of the two evils.
 
One of those two people and their party’s platform will rule the USA for the next four-to-eight years. And I’m too old and infirm to follow James Thurber’s advice (“Run, do not walk, to the nearest desert island.”).