12-28-2016, 11:54 PM
(12-24-2016, 06:35 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-24-2016, 03:02 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-24-2016, 02:20 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: "I listened as they called my President a Muslim.
I listened as they called him and his family a pack of monkeys... (Snip)
The above is based on truth and absolutely understandable.
It also illustrates just how divided and dysfunctional the country is.
While it looks inevitable that the divide is only going to get worse, for the country to become 'Great Again' we've got to grow beyond it someday.
Yes, if and when one side of the divide wins, a new consensus will develop around it. That's how a 4T and 1T work. I think now that this can only happen in a beneficial way if the progressive side wins.
...and if the fascist side wins, as it did in Spain in the last completed Crisis...
America becomes the sort of place where smart people use their 'solid' middle-school educations (who needs a high-school diploma to do most jobs, anyway?) to get a job, save some money, and take the first opportunity to emigrate? The one thing that America will be, like Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal, a place for cheap holidays. The best job will for most young people will be working in some resort hotel that offers plenty of opportunity to meet and greet single foreigners, turn on the charm, and maybe seduce the foreigner -- a 'prince' or 'princess' who will take one away from the barracks-like housing, the 60-hour workweek, the brutal boss, and being trim because one is underfed.
"My family has a dairy farm in Brazil" or "I am a barber in Berlin" will be more enticing than "I am an engineer in Louisville, Kentucky". America will have a brain drain anyway, as people find that a high standard of learning is no longer appreciated in a country in which playing dumb is good for survival. One must be stupid, masochistic, or super-rich to believe in a political order that has a new form of feudalism and pushes one of the most mind-trashing religions (Protestant fundamentalism) to have ever existed. Pie-in-the-Sky-When-You-Die, but only then, for if you eat any of the precious pie you might be beaten or imprisoned. Happiness is only for the elites.
Yes, I assume the worst with the contemporary Right. It has shown its moral bankruptcy, its contempt for reason, and its potential for destructiveness of everything that makes human life potentially enjoyable. So you work sixty hours a week and get to watch a sporting event as a reward -- on television.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.