I don’t know what I was expecting, being out of the country for only two weeks, but I must confess to being disappointed to return to the same madness and lack of common sense so clearly in evidence when we departed. We traveled extensively throughout two countries where overheated rhetoric based on racial and religious hatred isn’t the order of the day, and where politics can’t fairly be described as a three-ring circus. Returning to America’s special brand of anti-intellectualism, racism, and religious oppression was…disappointing, if not unexpected.
I saw a poll this morning which allocated 53% of Republican support to Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson, in that order. Think about that for a moment. More than half of Republicans support:
Donald Trump- who speaks only in broad generalities based on hatred and divisiveness,
Carly Fiorina- who wants to do to America what she did to Hewlett-Packard (run it into the ground), and who broke the law by doing business with Iran, and
Ben Carson- Who, for a person with an M.D. behind his name, is doing a helluva job of appealing to the ignorance and hatred that characterizes Republican primary voters. For someone ostensibly intelligent enough to become a doctor, Carson has effectively reinvented himself as an anti-intellectual Far Right-wing zealot.
I knew two weeks abroad wouldn’t cure what ails America, but I think part of me was hoping against hope that we’d return to discover it had only been a very bad dream. I know; if it wasn’t for self-delusion, I’d have no delusions at all.
