If You Don’t Have Anything To Say, Try Not To Say It 

    We seem to have a malady that has reached a new level of intensity among a certain group of public figures, semi-public figures, or public figure wannabes. The malady? These people can’t keep their mouths shut. They feel that if they’re not texting, tweeting, or in some other way alerting everyone to their every thought and action they are somehow letting humanity down. We’ll not add blogging to this list for obvious reasons, even though I’m not sure it should be exempt.    Today so much of what people are saying seems to be more like a frantic effort to be noticed or not to be forgotten. It’s like people feel they’ll either disappear or become a none-entity if they’re not saying something. 
    Today’s politicians are not exempt from this malady. If a day goes by where our President-Elect, Donald Trump doesn’t tweet, people take note and wonder what’s wrong. Of course, if he does tweet, the media is in a froth, disagreeing or reading something sinister into the tweeted comments. And many of his tweets are not really adding to the national intelligence or making him look presidential. 
    So, Mr. President Elect, it seems to me that you’re missing a lot of good opportunities to just be silent. It’s a simple concept. Paraphrasing fictional character Jesse Stone: “If you don’t have anything of substance to say, try not to say it.” People can’t take issue with what’s not said. Your quietness and reluctance to discuss the inane might even seem presidential.
    I'm picking on Trump here, but you can't spit without hitting a politician who is doing exactly the same thing.
     Of course, each one of these mostly inane tweets gives countless people something to do, and that is tweet a response, text their friends about the tweet, or encourage their friends to text/tweet about their own text, or about the tweet in question. Without this to occupy their intellects they’d have to just depend on themselves for entertainment, or companionship. Yikes! 
    Today the media is leading the pack in pitching the inane as something important. Examples: since when is the size of a Kardashian butt, or how a British Royal holds her purse, news? 
    One thing we seem to forget is that the primary objective of the media is not to inform, raise the level of intelligence, or to provide a public service. Its primary objective is to make an acceptable bottom line (I’m talking about profits for those of you still stuck on the Kardashian anomaly), like any other big business, and if it takes a Kardashian’s butt to pull in the readers, increase the viewing audience, and in turn sell more advertised products, then that’s what they’re going to do. And sad to say, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.
    The fact that many of our public leaders feel that they have to be constantly saying something whether it’s pertinent to anything or not, is a sad state of affairs, and reflects poorly on us, the voters.