What the next First Turning won't be like

[David Horn]

(01-15-2021, 03:19 PM)mamabug Wrote:

(01-15-2021, 12:01 PM)David Horn Wrote: My own experience here, deep in the heart of Red Country, tends to disprove your point.  Are they QAnon?  Maybe not, but the same QAnon nonsense  comes out of their mouths: anti-vax, Trump won, and Trump did nothing wrong.  Sorry, there is no moral or ethical equivalent to that, to say nothing of basic rationality.

I'm smack dab in the heart of Blue Country, which may be why we have such different views on left v. right.  The democrats could nominate an actual donkey for president (or state senator) and we would vote for it.

Here, most people who lean right are those that feel left out of the economic prosperity enjoyed by the urban elites - the guy who came to fix my dishwasher was an ardent Trump fan.  My husband drives for Uber and he has picked up a lot of people who favored Trump in the last election.  Most of them are working class and small business owners who can't work remotely and are losing money under our 'one-size-fits-all' lockdown approach.  The vast majority of counties have had less than 60 deaths and are well under hospital capacity limits, yet they are subject to the exact same restrictions as our five high population areas.

The other 'Trump' supporters in the state are rural communities whose livelihoods are repeatedly threatened by urban voters that impose environmental restrictions that are either impractical or expensive to implement without thought for balancing competing needs or reimbursing those impacted.  

Most of the actual anti-vaxxers in my part of the world are leftover from the hippie communalists that distrusted government and fought the man.

The motivations seem similar in both your area and mine.  There's no question that many educated people struggled to get where they are, and have zero sympathy for those who refused to do likewise, assuming they did it and so can others.  The blow back from that is justified.  I worked with many highly educated people who couldn't tie their own shoes (literally, in some cases).  Being competent and underpaid is infuriating, especially when you are covering the asses of people paid much more.  I get the feeling.  But I live in an are where being educated is actually looked down on.  If you listen to country music, a lot of it is about that very thing.

It doesn't change the facts on the ground, though.  Global Warming is real, and the cost to fix it will be borne by those people who benefitted from creating the problem.  If you're a coal miner, you're not going to be doing that much longer.  But massive inequality is different.  That was caused intentionally by the greed heads who have run the show for decades.  They are powerful, in control of the "center" of both major parties, and see no reason to change the rules now -- even with evidence that they are destroying the very thing they wish to own outright. The non-elite Red and Blue are both affected, so the sooner they get it through their thick skulls that they have a common and very powerful enemy, the sooner we get on with it.