I am tempted to open this article with the apocryphal quote “may you live in interesting times” which is an American made quote that for credibility was attributed to a non-existent Chinese saying. It comes from American, possibly British politicians, but despite the fact we document everything our politicians do, it seems those who care can’t even agree on the origin of the phrase, beyond the fact it most certainly isn’t actually Chinese. I think I will stick with it, as obviously, I already have, as it speaks to the complete lack of logic, reason, or rutter that we find ourselves in politically now.
We have one candidate who was foretold as the end of the Republic, which we always hear dumbed down to Democracy, who was going to use the courts to investigate and convict his opponents and if that didn’t work assassinate them, and who was going to use false intelligence from his allies in Russia to damage his opponents, who did none of these things while in office and has since being defeated with the help of US intelligence who discredited actual intel and who vouched for Russian intel that later turned out to be false, prosecuted by those political opponents in court and convicted, and most recently was almost assassinated in an attempted by unrelated persons of interest who were “lost” while armed and at a rally.
We have another candidate from the party that is championing our “Democracy” who failed to win the nomination for the position she now runs for as the candidate the members of that party voted for stepped down after swearing he would not, because he was fully capable and not suffering from any diminished capacity when anyone with a pulse and a mental capacity that is, well, slightly greater than the current sitting President could plainly see for a long time now.
Our country has reached a point where reasonable, logical, and rational questions and comments are now borderline criminal and quite possibly treasonous.
How did we get here? Sadly, in the same way an elephant is eaten, one bite at a time. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to slowly remove ourselves from this position. We must induce philosophical vomiting as soon as possible. Just in case you have any doubts, it is going to hurt, a lot, for it is a whole elephant we have swallowed after all, perhaps a whole herd of elephants. Don’t believe me? Did you take heart from my description of the candidates above because I focused on the hypocrisy of the current system? Don’t blame yourself, you are conditioned to at this point, and most would, but unless you believe the whole system corrupt, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, I did say convicted. So, you are cheering for a convicted criminal as the better of the two options, which perhaps he is, but in either case, proves the point of what a completely irrational position we find ourselves in.
It should be a national embarrassment and tragedy that the two political parties in, what is still arguably the most powerful country in the world, offered us a candidates, the best of whom from the one is now a convicted criminal and from the other is one who is unvoted on because they replaced a candidate who is still our sitting President by the way, who is perhaps not a convicted criminal only because his memory was so poor as to cast doubt on if they could get a conviction due to the requirement of needing to prove intentionality. As if to further gild the lily on this point, the other candidate from this same party who ran in 2016 was just found guilty of skirting federal election spending laws in an amount 45 times larger than the amount the current candidate is now a convicted criminal was found guilty of spending in violation of the same laws in his NY State case.
Have we really been so conditioned, that we truly believe that this is the best of us? That those in Congress are the best of us? At least in Congress we can find a few who might be potential standard bearers of hope, but they seem to be fighting a system alone. We as a people have to start demanding some accountability here. Were it not for the Supreme Court we could be in more trouble than we are. I know that even that statement will make some furious, but I’m sorry, most of their verdicts amount to forcing the government to function as it should. I will use the case of Roe v Wade as my example as that is more likely than not why you are mad about the Supreme Court remark, if you are.
That verdict was a patchwork quilt of legal arguments strung together in a fine example of what a court really wasn’t meant to do. The party that supported this verdict most uniformly has controlled all the House, Senate & Presidency from 1977-1981, 1993-1995, 2009-2011, and 2021-2023, with a super majority a few times during those periods. Yet the call is to “restore” Roe v Wade, which is in itself, a complete miscommunication of how our system should work. You don’t restore verdicts; you make laws that give the courts the proper laws to rule on. If you don’t like the verdicts, you don’t change the court, you change the laws. The only way you can properly adjust the laws is if the courts rule on them clearly, as they are written. Allowing, or worse wanting, courts to “fix” things by ruling as their appointees would like the laws to be only complicates the problem.
We need to hold our representatives accountable; we need to hold the parties accountable; we need to hold ourselves accountable for permitting this erosion to occur. We have an amazing amount of ability and intelligence in our country. You will never convince me personally that we can’t solve the problems that face us. Abortion, can we not find a way to provide incubation to cover the situations where continuing a pregnancy is damaging to the mother for a host of reasons? It isn’t like there aren’t a host of would-be adoption candidates out there wanting these children. Let’s tackle another one that makes people easily angered, like immigration. We are a country of immigrants, built on immigration, improved by immigration. We also have the right and need to have secure and guarded borders. Can we really, in 40 years, or more, not find a way, particularly now, to fix the immigration problem? We can clearly secure our borders when we want. We also can clearly identify almost anyone, anywhere now in a very short period of time. So, how about we push for a Congress that uses the technology we have to streamline the process for those wishing to come here legally, stop the illegal entries immediately, and find a sane and logical system for going through those who are here.
This is the fun thing about the rare, but rational approach to problems. When you have the resources we have, you can usually find solutions. We must recognize the chaos and lack of action is, at least in part, due to the fact that it benefits those we’ve allowed into office don’t benefit from fixing problems but pitting us against each other in endless conflict over the issues not fixing them has created. We the People, at least for the moment, still have the power. We better learn to use it more wisely, or we won’t have it much longer. We are citizens of our fine Republic, not the enemies of it, nor enemies to each other, we need to remember that. Our Constitution is meant to limit our Government, not its citizens, we need to remember that too.
