Quick question: In a word or two, how would you characterize the youth of today?
Before you answer, perhaps it would be a good idea to “walk down memory lane” and see what some of our ancestors thought about this very issue.
I love this piece in Time Magazine, but trust me, it gets worse. Quickly.
Maybe it’s time that the majority of Americans simply chill out with respect to the hateful stupidity that pervades our most backward states. We’ve been trying to fix what’s wrong in the Deep South for 150 years. It simply doesn’t work.
There’s a reason that most people in, for instance, Mississippi or Arkansas, live there. If they want to ban books (see meme at left), deny science, or teach creationism as science, perhaps it’s time to say, Have It Your Way, as in the old Burger King commercial.
From Neil Young’s song: Alabama. You have the rest of the union to help you along. What’s going wrong?
The answer: Nothing whatsoever. This is precisely what these people want. So why not let them live their dream? They’re already at the bottom in education, economic opportunity, and healthcare, and they’re close to the top in racial violence and gun deaths. How much further can they fall?
Now, obviously, there is a line. Don’t lynch black people. If it comes down to bodily injury, we’ll be after you, as we explained to the assassins of Ahmaud Arbery and anyone else who was listening, when our justice system sentenced this innocent black jogger’s three murderers to life in prison, and, up until fairly recently, would have fried them in the state’s electric chair, like so many pieces of chicken.
Seriously, after almost two centuries, it’s time to learn that societal concepts like Trump, white supremacy, and cold, raw ignorance coupled with seething hate against non-Whites just may be the perfect path for some people.
Perhaps it’s plain time for the rest of us to turn our attention elsewhere.
There are problems we can solve, and others we simply can’t.
Here’s a piece in New Republic entitled Ron DeSantis Wants to Make It a Felony to Have an Undocumented Person in Your Home or Car.
The truth is this: No he doesn’t. DeSantis knows that introducing a hateful and clearly unconstitutional bill like this is a quick and extremely effective way to attract media attention and drive this nation’s people into a frenzy, with him in the spotlight, yet one more time.
Can’t we just hear Americans’ thoughts?
Half of us: Didn’t we learn anything from the Nazis, when people were hanged for harboring Jews? Can an Uber driver go to jail because he didn’t check one of his riders’ papers? Can you think of anything more blatantly stupid and mean?
The other half: Yeah! Biden has opened the border, and immigrants are pouring across it like ants to steal our jobs. If the radical left has successfully weaponized the Justice Department to come after Trump, DeSantis is our last chance to save this great country!
Anyone who thinks that Ron DeSantis, an educated person, actually supports a law that couldn’t get past the Supreme Court in North Korea, is an idiot.
But, as they say, we live among them.
It’s easy to see where Harrison Ford is coming from here.
Personally, I’m not too concerned about the denial of science in its most visible forms, e.g., QAnon and the flat Earthers. Even the COVID and climate deniers don’t scare me.
What terrifies me is that our world leaders are motivated more by wealth and power than they are in making sure that science predominates our thinking when it comes to policy-making.
The reason this planet is in the process of baking itself isn’t that we have a certain percentage of idiots who don’t understand AGW (the theory of anthropogenic global warming); it’s that human civilization can’t motivate itself to do what our climate scientists are begging us to do.
Taking money from stupid people is a business model that dates back at least thousands of years. As Aesop put it, “A fool and his money are soon parted.”
Suppose you’re selling used cars. Anyone with an IQ over 80 understands that he’s walking into a lion’s den when he shows up on your lot, and so, arguably, he deserves what he gets.
But consumers of news? IMO, Fox News has no right to deliberately lie to its viewers, regardless of how unintelligent most of them are, and how poorly they’re regarded by the “news” source.
I wrote a post yesterday on the meme here whose point is that government and other people owe us nothing.
A point I failed to make at the time is that Americans who hold this belief know nothing about civics. There is a reason that there are three branches of government, and, in particular, that the judiciary is among them.
The legislative branch makes our laws, but those laws sometimes violate our rights as citizens, and as human beings.
An example: Until recently my mother lived in Hawaii, and we frequently discussed the case in which our government sought to put a telescope on the land that the indigenous people believed to be sacred. She asked me, “Since there are more of us than there are of them, why doesn’t the majority rule?” I responded, “It’s a matter of rights, not votes. If the majority of people in my little cow town want me tarred and feathered for my progressive beliefs, shouldn’t I be protected, not by local laws, but by the judiciary?”
Our founding fathers designed our government to protect our rights, regardless of popular opinion.
Another interesting example is embodied in Our Children’s Trust, aka “Children v. the U.S. Government,” a group that works to force the federal government to take action on climate change mitigation, on the basis that young people have rights to a stable climate. The group argues, with mixed success thus far, that the oil companies, as generally supported by the federal government, have violated their plaintiffs’ rights. Big Oil has known since the late 1970s that the ongoing consumption of fossil fuels is assured to cause grievous harm to young people, as their home planet will lose an ever-increasing portion of its capacity to support life.
We’ll see where this is going to go.
In the meanwhile, we have rights, regardless of what the idiots claim.
Here’s a matter on which we’ve speculated a great deal in the past two years.
Trump’s niece is going for whimper, i.e., there will no explosion (like Trump convicted of treason).
Frankly, I hope she’s wrong.
Isn’t it amazing that people have to be told this?
Worse, explaining this basic idea to many people doesn’t work; we live among folks who are unwilling to make any sacrifice whatsoever when it comes to the quality of life they’re leaving for their descendants.
How did U.S. politics become so insane? What exactly happened here?
I suspect it was a combination of things:
• The media discovered that it could transition news from a public service into an extremely lucrative industry, if it could only sensationalize the content to the point that people would have a 24-hour-a-day appetite for it.
• The education level of the common American sank to a point that many people lost the ability to think critically and examine what they were being told.
• Information and communications technology ushered in a tsunami of wealth to our country, but it went almost entirely to the top 1%, leaving the working class angry, and looking for a scapegoat.
• A criminal conman came along and capitalized on all this ignorance and frustration.
• The news media created entire cable channels dedicated to fanning the flames of white, middle-class anger, without any regard for telling the truth.
So here we are, with tens of millions of extremely hostile and heavily armed people believing that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, and that Donald Trump is their only source of truth.
If you believe that America is weakened by abandoning Ukraine, letting its people get barbecued by Putin, and emboldening an authoritarian regime to take over Europe, you’ve been listening to too much Fox News (or worse).
