09-09-2019, 08:11 AM
(09-09-2019, 04:58 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(09-06-2019, 08:41 AM)David Horn Wrote: New leadership that sets a higher moral tone can reverse that, but it takes a long time to get there.
Politicians don't have to be perfect people, just a bit better than the rest. Or at least be perceived that way by their voters. You see how this drags down standards.
(09-06-2019, 05:16 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: It will also take a public that rejects demagogues who make contradictory but nebulous promises, business administrators who care about customers and subordinates, politicians who head constituents more than they heed lobbyists. journalists who put objective truth above a rigid agenda, and perhaps even creative people who inculcate the idea that destructive behavior ruins the destructive person. Education? Very simply, we need to teach that there is more to life than quick thrills, chemical highs, sex, material indulgence, bureaucratic power, and mind-numbing entertainment.
Sounds like life in a High.
Maybe this time we will go to a High due alone to cultural change and not because our cities look like Hamburg, Dresden, Warsaw, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki at the end of the last Crisis Era. We have been slow to congeal as a people in this Crisis, perhaps because our elites still wallow in ways of the 3T even if they force Crisis-style sacrifices upon the rest of us.
Hypocrisy has a proclivity for implosion. If Donald Trump does something incredibly stupid, then we might end this Crisis with a scenario in some ways parallel to Seven Days in May , if not for the pretexts in the book and the movie. The President having the Air Force refuel at his resort for above-market rates and commit airmen to stay at overpriced Trump hotels? I doubt that that is going down well in the Air Force.
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.