Fear of this or that is so prominent in our American society right now. A substantial minority on the right fringe of our political system has made fear a foundation of their lives. But the most tragic thing is that those on the rest of the political spectrum have allowed the rather thin minority’s fear to convince us that all hope is lost!
I know, 81% of white evangelicals voted for #CO3 because they fear what America is becoming. They can see that they will soon no longer have the dominant role in our country’s future and that scares the hell out of them. Many in this category are racists by nature and upbringing and just can’t fathom a country where “those other people” have the same leverage as they do.
This 81% make up less than one-in-five voters in this country and due to the rest of us not taking our responsibility to vote seriously enough, they managed to put a racist and totally unqualified narcissist temporarily in control. Instead of surrendering to the Evangelical fear we need to be gearing up to do everything necessary to take our country back. That effort starts this November and is finalized twenty-four months later.
So, the primary message of this post is that all you folks who have let the right fringes’ fear traumatize you quit the pity party and recognize how this happened. If we do that, we will look back at these times as when we let a radical fringe temporarily take command. Hopefully, this is a lesson we don’t have to learn again anytime in the future.
#CO3 – Current Oval Office Occupant
So, I celebrate Mr. Trump’s success in making a deal with the Democrats even to the total dismay of the GOP. Maybe this is the beginning of a successful Trump strategy. I am certainly a dreamer aren’t I? 🙂
I don’t necessarily call, at least yet, our current times evil but none the less the Edmund Burke quote above applies to where we are as a country. Too many of us decided to sit out the last election cycle and what we got is the result. I certainly hope that this is a lesson learned and election participation increases dramatically in the coming years. We can no longer allow a radical fringe minority to choose our country’s leadership.
But to me “Hope is sweeter than despair”. I simply can’t live with the possibility of today becoming the new norm for our country. When one of my fellow bloggers who I probably admire the most proclaims that “Empathy is dead in our government” it shocked me to no end. This person is usually a very upbeat soul who blogs that anyone can have a happy and satisfying retirement and then helps us to understand how to make that happen. He is now basically saying that we are all on our own as the future will be “survival of the fittest” so you have to take care of yourself.
I have to admit up front that for much of my life I just didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I “grew up”. Strangely, it wasn’t until several years into my retirement that I finally put that question to rest. So, I am NOT the poster child for gaining purpose in life, but maybe my shortcomings in this area might be a lesson for others.
A fundamental problem with this country and many others around the world is that too many just don’t have any idea what the meaning of our country is supposed to be about? Without this foundation, every bad thing that happens causes ever-increasing cynicism and selfishness. There is no hope because there is no overall vision for what we want our country to be. Positive thinking seems to have almost vanished in the world today. Maybe even more tragically, there are those who have come to a conclusion about purpose and their answer is simply too self-centered to be of value.
It seems my recent brush with death has left me with a different attitude toward life. We are tragically wasting our lives with our obsession with fear when instead we should be celebrating all the reasons that hope is on our horizon.
recognize that a person does not need to put in a 40 hour week to be determined valuable we can move beyond that 100-year-old paradigm. Voice recognition has made major improvements in the last year or so. For me, that means closed captioning is almost real-time and more accurate than it ever has been. Anyone that uses a smartphone knows that voice-to-text is also getting much more accurate. I suspect that in the near future a universal translator will be on the scene. That will mean that we can go anywhere in the world and fully communicate despite language barriers. Our future is bright indeed.
But for far too many of us our world is a world of fear. We fear others that are different from us. We think their overlying purpose is to do us harm. Republicans hate Democrats, progressives have conservatives. Our fear list is almost unlimited. The current U.S. Federal administration is all about fear. They are seriously considering drastically increasing an already absurd military budget while making some draconian cuts to brother’s keeper issues. Everything seems to be about fear now. Hope has moved to a back burner when it should be on the forefront.