Play fair. Don’t hit people. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
- Robert Fulghum
Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss.
- Samuel Johnson
Purely out of a desire for self-preservation and to maintain my sanity, I didn’t watch the recent Democratic Presidential debate. In my mind, it’s just Too. Damned. Early. With a bit over 12 months remaining until the election, I’m trying hard to resist the permanent campaign mentality that seems to be becoming the new normal. Yes, I’m interested in what the candidates have to say, but my problem is that with so much time between now and November 2016, it’s still more of a horse race or a beauty contest or [insert whatever trite analogy comes to mind here]. There will be a time when I will be VERY interested and attentive…it’s just that now isn’t the time.
I haven’t watched any of the Republican debates, either…and for the same reason, with the addition of not wanting my head to explode from the ignorance, racism, religious zealotry, and sheer lunacy. I’ve read enough commentary and seen enough clips from the debates to know that one of these things is not like the other. My bias is that I lean far to the left (no great surprise there). Even if I try to be objective there’s no way to escape the reality that Democrats may not bring the fireworks, but the Republican field is rife with lunatics, liars, racist, science deniers, religious zealots, and demagogues of all stripes. “Pathetic” seems so inadequate to the task of describing the collection of mental and moral midgets chasing the GOP nomination.
It really is beginning to seem as if the choice next year will be between a dishonest, science-denying lunatic and someone who at least tries to ground their policy proposals in something resembling reality. The sad thing is that a significant segment of the American Sheeple seem more than willing to swallow the lies and propaganda without question. They’ve been so thoroughly and completely propagandized that they can no longer distinguish truth from ficition. Because of this, they’ve been conditioned to assume and expect the worst from Liberals, non-Christians, gun control advocates, the LGBT community- in short, anyone not like them. It’s SO much easier when you know who to hate…even if you don’t necessarily know why.
If we’re to have any hope of making progress on fixing what ails this country, we have to be able to live in the realm of truth. We can’t be hip-deep in a miasma of propaganda, half-truths, disinformation, and/or half-baked religious dogma. We can be denying the validity of science simply because it doesn’t mesh with our preconceived notions. The ONLY way we can have any hope of moving this country forward is with a devotion to honesty, integrity, and dealing with things as they actually ARE, not how we believe they SHOULD be. We have to stop deluding ourselves into believing silly, stupid, and meaningless things- like “more guns only makes everyone safer” or “the problems with this country started when they kicked God out of our public schools.”
If our leaders can’t model this sort of behavior, and if we refuse to hold them to that standard, we have only ourselves to blame for the sort of inept, hateful, dogmatic moral midgets who run for public office on the Far Right these days. Perhaps if we demanded that our elected leaders deal with things as they are and addressed problems as they exist in the real world, we might have some hope of getting better quality government.
Instead, we inhabit a world in which Donald Trump and Ben Carson are front-runners among Republican Presidential candidates. If the sort of intellectual and moral vacuity modeled by those two sorry excuses for humanity doesn’t frighten you to your core, you’re not paying attention…which goes a long way toward explaining why we are where we are.
