Can Americans still be counted on do the right thing?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Jan. 31, 2025 – What knowledge was imparted to a Baby Boomer, during twenty years of schooling, produced the impression that civilization is a mean and soulless thing when seen up close, but is a glorious, ascending procession when viewed from afar.
Thus ennobled by the long view, we find the drive and courage to fall in step to make such contributions it is everybody’s unique ability, and duty, to make. Guided by imaginations that are both carrot and stick, we devote ourselves to the toil and drudgery of hours, days, weeks, months, and years so that the procession delivers us to some measure of an earthly paradise, as it proceeds toward the establishment of peace and harmony.
We arrive at the 250th anniversary of the American experiment in republican self-governance, however, when that procession seems to have made an abrupt about-face, as if we’ve judged our war of independence a mistake and failure. Suddenly, it seems the American people have lost sufficient faith in themselves to do the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time, as they had done up to and through the second world war.
This time, however, it takes a magical flight of fancy to discern forward motion on the part of the American people, since we’ve re-elected someone hell-bent on dismantling and reversing every good thing done on the people’s behalf by his predecessors in the Oval Office.
No reasonable people issue a mandate to govern that does not honor the same mandate in prior administrations. Yet that is what happened, which must say more about about the voters than about fraud who tricked them into sending him to the White House instead of to prison.
Instead of being guided honorably and hopefully into the future, we Americans are made to witness a titanic temper tantrum, along with the massively wasteful destruction of the apparatus of government.
A quick and current Churchill would have been alarmed but not surprised by the 2016 election; but the election of 2024 would have blown his mind. He already would have seen us repeat the error of his and other empires that wasted a generation in Afghanistan, and so our election of men not fit to be president would not surprise him.
But for the great and good people of America to send someone to the White House when all the facts on the ground indicate that he belongs in prison, even as nimble a politician as Churchill never would have predicted a second term for the angry agent of revenge.
The world inhabited and made better by Roosevelt and Churchill was a world led by leaders put in charge of political platforms that had been crowd-sourced, and so they were representative of broad ideas that had been hashed out by countless citizens in every region of the country.
Until screened media became the nation’s primary source of information, every town and locality produced its own version of the news, and every partisan newspaper and radio station was kept reasonably honest by every other partisan newspaper and radio station. The marketplace of ideas depends as much on competition to deliver value for cost as does any other marketplace.
Avid competition between clearly written and widely published political platforms is essential to the health and well-being of a republic. Bullies, frauds, and felons do not publish plans for the the problems of today and tomorrow. Instead they attack real and imagined enemies, destroy current work, condemn and threaten everyone who disagrees.
On January 20, 2025, within the tiny scope of a selfie, was seen the soulless mugs of half-a-dozen men who own more wealth than eighty percent of the population. Each of them a money-drunk coward, sworn to praise and obey a man they never would have hired even to be a janitor at their own businesses. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Fox, and Apple control so much screened media that it is no wonder how the nation lost her mind.
I say, de-fund the phony oligarchs. Tell Alex, Siri, Google, et al to go to hell. Fire the coward Bezos and re-empower local merchants and small business. Quit Facebook, X and their copycats. Stop adding your precious family photos and news to the monetized honeypot where algorithms mingle them with all manner of disgusting material.
Anybody who believes POTUS to be the solution to what troubles America today must be listed among the problems, sad to say.