Facing reality

My children frequently get in situations over their head without realizing it or, if they do realize, without knowing how to swim to shore (or sometimes even recognize where the shore is...but that's a different story.) Like journalists who report stories about how too much emphasis is given to polling in an election and only minutes later report on the latest poll, they seem caught without tools to evaluate our understand the contradictions in their lives.
When I was a child, I had a reality show. The entire world watched while I sang, danced, and went through the everyday drama of being 8 years old. When I was 9, the show was cancelled: I knew it was stupid.
I would hate to grow up in my children's future, where reality is much more slippery. But the truth is, I'm already there. My son's thinking that he is invincible and can drive a car to the limits of its control on a windy road is not so different from thinking that the election before us won't change our life one way or the other. When our debates become reality show contests, with winners and losers and all of us already knowing who we like best without giving the others a chance, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real reality: that politics is about one thing only: power. The air we breathe, education we receive, jobs we are allowed to have (or not to have) and health care we access are not coins in a game of poker--they are real.
Reality.