Cold Turkey

America’s addiction to all things grandiose and excessive seems to have come to a head in recent months.

Forget what the college economics textbooks teach you -- individuals are emotional and irrational.

Sure, in the theoretical Guns and Butter (or, for the hip new-school textbooks which try to build "street cred" with students: Beer and Pizza) world, there's a rational trade-off, supported by thoroughly structured and emotionally detached reasoning and rationale. But in our world, which we'll refer to as "reality", there is one additional and important variable to add to the equation: Emotion. And one additional and important variable to subtract from the equation: Rationality.

Few things cloud a person’s objectivity faster than the insertion of politics into a conversation.

 Simply stated, when political issues and platforms can be boiled down to bumper sticker slogans and backpack patches to bolster support, the absence of perspective and detail greatly detract from one’s ability to objectively analyze the topic at hand.