The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-21-2020, 07:27 PM)gabrielle Wrote: Well, if all the "reds" know how to hunt and fish, then when the shit goes down and America dissolves into total socio-economic collapse you guys will instantly assemble into a sustainable hunter-gatherer society and everything will be hunky-dory, right?  Perhaps you can start raising crops to buy protection from local warlords against the roving brigands.

Here's the Bigger Picture: Lift social distancing too soon and the virus surges back, even stronger.  The health care system is overwhelmed, and we have "many more body bags," as the director of the WHO put it.  A large number of those in the body bags will be health care workers, a generation of medical expertise that cannot be replaced.  If you think the suffering and sacrifice we are dealing with now is bad, just you wait and see how much worse it can get.

I keep going back to the red tendency to not see problems that require a big government to solve, and to deny science which says the problems will exist.

Rachel Monday night ran will a little “Earth One” vs “Earth Two” theme.  I think it is DC Comics that went for a while with two parallel story lines, with different characters, uniforms, plot lines, histories, etc….   (DC is not alone.  It is a common theme in SF, for example Star Trek has it’s Mirror Universe.) The two realities had nothing to do with each other save for a few cross reality plot lines.  

Rachel suggested the real world and the conservative world are like that.  If you don’t want to spend money to solve a problem, the reds can save money by pretending the problem doesn’t exist.  Bridges collapsing, global warming, pollution, guns, lots of problems exist more in more densely populated regions, or only develop slowly enough to pretend they are not looming.  Thus it is quite possible to say if a problem is not confronting them directly, they aren’t going to pay for anyone to solve the problem.

This attitude was quite possible to extend itself indefinitely before Coronavirus.  Again, I was deep into creating an Information Age variation of S&H for what happens when there is a Crisis without a Trigger and Regeneracy.  With nukes making a Crisis War unlikely, what would come along that would be comparable to a Lexington and Concord, a Fort Sumter, a Pearl Harbor?

Right now, some reds are very hesitant to embrace the Conoravirus as the Trigger, as seeing the Unraveling ethic of selfishness and problem denial as rendered obsolete.  The virus is significant, scientifically provable, and culture changing.  They are trying to pretend the problem out of existence as they have so many problems in the recent past.  They are not willing to accept the medical worker and other first responders as heroes, and a culture where you are expected to sacrifice for the common good.  They want to (with apologies to Aerosmith) Dream On.

I don’t see them making pretend well enough.  That apparently doesn’t mean they won’t try.  In the three last Crises, there were ugly times when the Crisis War seemed long and hard, and the best way to solve it was to surrender to the forces of royalty, slavery or fascism.  America didn’t quit the last three times, and I doubt they will quit now.  This does not mean that a few blind fools will cling to the old way of looking at things, cheering on the kings, slave owners and dictators.  I talk of Atlanta during the Civil War and Berlin during World War II as necessary prerequisites for submerging the old world view.  World views are that stubborn.  It takes a major disaster to change a culture, a proof that the Old Way will not work, that a change is necessary and to be forced.  

I do not doubt the virus has the capability for similar disaster.  The concept of creating an “Earth Two” alternate view of a world were no problems can exist if the perfect blindfold is worn will become much more unpalatable when the problem bites the blindfolded people in the rear.  Then, but only then, will they consider taking the blindfold off.

Maybe.

Someday.

Eventually.