What's a Person to do, Part Deux

When in doubt, check it out. That's my philosophy.

Let's say you open a puzzle box with no picture on the outside showing what the puzzle will be when completed. You dump out the pieces and find that half of them are missing.

You proceed to move the pieces around, eventually putting together one half of the picture, which turns out to be a mountain with a bit of snow on it. All of the pieces of the puzzle to complete the right side are missing, so you gaze at the left side and try to picture what the right side must look like.

Looking at the left side of the mountain, you assume the right side is basically a mirror image, as it's just a mountain and they tend to be conical. There's a little creek or river that runs along the base of the mountain, but which, of course, ends abruptly at the edge of the nothingness that is the right side. There are small trees here and there, and the sky appears to be blue, with a few high white clouds that look to continue on the right side of the picture.

The next day you are at the store, Puzzles R Us, and you see a box with that very same puzzle. This puzzle box, however, has a picture of the entire puzzle.

You examine the picture to see what was missing in your puzzle from the day before. Imagine your shock when you find that the right half of the mountain is not at all a mirror image of the left, but is instead a large dark grey crater. There's a plume of steam coming out of the center of the crater where a volcanic dome has grown. The steam rises into the sky where it appears to have been blown by the wind onto the left side of the picture, giving the illusion of white, puffy clouds.

The little creek that ran along the base of the mountain meanders over to the right side of the picture and empties into a large lake. The day before, you had assumed it would just disappear into the tree line. The lake takes up the entire lower right half of the puzzle, creating an upsidedown mirror image of the destroyed side of the mountain.

While there are a few small, scattered trees visible through the patchy snow dotting the left side of the mountain, the right side is a burnt wasteland. The blast from the eruption destroyed the trees on the right side of the mountain, leaving a charred landscape of debris and fallen timber in its wake.

The picture from your puzzle of yesterday didn't represent this picture before you at all. What appeared to be a typical snow covered mountain scene turned out to be Mt. St. Helens, in Washington state, several years after its eruption.

This is what the mainstream media does: it gives you the left side of the picture, leaving out details from the right side so that the picture you are seeing is not complete. As that old saying goes, "There are two sides to every story."

Today's hot buttons of health care reform, cap and trade, and multiple "stimulus" bills are presented by the MSM with one point of view only: theirs, which is left. There are valid sources for opposing points of view out there, but the MSM rarely gives these entities a stage upon which to present the other side.

Liberals are not the only people who populate this country, but it would appear as though their point of view is the only valid p.o.v., since that is the only one presented in the news. This is why people like me scour the internet for validation, verification, and additional information. I take what I find and I write about it. Is it one sided? Hell yes. Why should I take the time to add the left side into my writing when it's already been exhaustively covered by the MSM?

My next blog will be devoted entirely to health care reform - the way I see it. Warning: it will be presented from the right.

Disclaimer: I don't know if such a picture of Mt. St. Helens actually exists as I have depicted here, but I do know that for many years after the eruption, the mountain presented this contrast of nature until trees began growing in abundance once again.