Apathy is the Enemy

It is certainly easy to blame Republicans for the mess we find ourselves in with regard to who is in control of the government.  We have seen a steady erosion of Democratic support over the past couple of decades as the Republicans have systematically and methodically gerrymandered voting districts and supported the creation of voter ID laws and other obstacles to voting by the most vulnerable of our citizens. Then there is the resulting creeping absorption of our statehouses and governorships fostered by this slow moving tsunami of Republican influence.

The result of this conservative wet blanket over our democracy has been an erosion of what most Americans believe are fair-minded ideas on all manner of actions and decisions that would benefit the vast majority of citizens. 

Why has this happened?  How is it, for example, that the current Health Care ‘compromise’ being created by Senate Republicans in a back room somewhere without any debate is possible? 

The men and women who have engineered this kind of reprehensible action have been installed there by ‘US’.  Who are “US”?  “US” is the voters of this great land. 

And therein lies the problem, my countrymen. We are apathetic!  Liberals are too disengaged to vote.  Republican conservatives are not.

From the New York Times this morning in an editorial by Dave Leonhart:

“Last year, Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Clinton over Trump in a landslide..  Only 43 percent of citizens in that age group voted, however.   By contrast, Americans over age 65 supported Trump — and 71 percent of them voted. Similarly, Americans in their 30s were more likely to support Clinton, and less likely to vote, than those in their 50s.

And the gaps grow even larger in midterm elections. A mere 17 percent — 17 percent! — of Americans between 18 and 24 voted in 2014, compared with 59 percent of seniors.

The country’s real silent majority prefers Democrats, if only that majority could be stirred to vote.”

So I ask you, who are the real laggards?  If you examine the position of the majority of Americans on issues like health care, gun control, minimum wages, abortion, the environment, climate change, and a myriad of other challenges, you will be amazed to see that the MAJORITY of Americans take progressive leaning positions (more than 50%) on all these issues.  And yet, our elected officials take contrary positions in service to corporate masters and their own sometimes puritanical view of life in this country.  How did these people get to where they are to be able to steer our nation in these directions?

The simple answer is that we have been too lazy to direct our own destiny.  To reverse the course we are on as a nation means that we all must take more interest and more action—in the form of VOTING---to change our direction.   Data from the 2016 Presidential election shows that over 100 million people(almost half) who are eligible to vote in the U.S. didn't vote.  There is the answer!

Unless we as citizens get up off our indifferent asses, nothing will change and in fact it will probably get worse.

There is another more insidious reason we are so apathetic.  We are not teaching our children civics any more.  Our educational system is not teaching our kids how our government works and how they can make it work better.  When you can go onto a college campus and find a majority of students who can’t tell you what the three branches of government are, how many senators there are, or who is the President, or how many states are in the union, or what year we gained our independence from England, or what the Civil War was, we have a more fundamental problem.

Apathy.   That is the curse we must remedy.  Otherwise we are on a slow but relentless downward slide to ……..what?

EXCUSE ME!!

I am listening to the TV drone on as I go through my email this morning, and my ears suddenly pick up a tidbit of information that innocently floats by:  There are only 31 legislative days left for Congress to be in session before Labor Day…….wait a minute!  It is June 6 and there are only 31 working days left for our overburdened legislators?  There are 90 days on the calendar until Labor Day!

OMIGOSH!  Do they get the entire month of August off because they are so exhausted from all that legislating??

Am I to understand that these arrogant malingering sluggards who represent us, each of whom has a base salary of $174,000 + benefits, are only good for another 31 days in the next 90 to do the people’s work?  This is outrageous!  Look at the published legislative calendars from the Congress:

I’m sorry, I work AT LEAST 256 days a year and I make nowhere near $200K a year.  These deadbeats who can’t define the word ‘compromise’ in their dictionary, and who reportedly spend at least 50% of their time looking for money for re-election, are operating at a level that would get most of them fired if they were working ‘for a living’.

And all I hear on TV are Republican legislators bemoaning the fact that their ‘agenda’ is not getting realized.  Never mind that they hold the keys to power in all three branches of government!  Somehow those pesky Democrats are holding everything up:  won’t confirm appointments to 550 plus jobs that require Senate approval even though over 500 have yet to be nominated.  How about the fact that all the recently fired US Attorneys have not been replaced by even one appointment by the administration.  Let me see…..do you think that slows down the nations judicial system at all?? 

Oh yeah, where is the newly appointed FBI Director---- tucked away in some dark recess of the President’s mind, I guess.  And what about all that legislative action promised on health care, infrastructure, tax reform, fabulously negotiated trade deals, etc.  If the GOP can’t make any of this happen with all three branches under their control, why should we believe they can govern anything?  Why should they be there at all?

After whining for 8 years about all the horrible things the past administration did to the American people and obstructing nearly every initiative attempted by the Democrats to fix anything, now we are supposed to believe that it is impossible for them to breach some sort of Democratic Maginot Line against any agenda they present.  Puh-leese!

Who Are We?

So the time has come for all Americans to ask, “Who are we, and what kind of country do we want to be?”

 Over the past year and specifically over the past 5 months, we have seen what it means to be a ‘Trump-lead Nation’.  Actions have been taken and things have be said that profile America and Americans as people who now do not really have the humanistic and altruistic motivations and objectives that have been the driving force for liberty, fairness, empathy and compassion that have been hallmarks of what we always assumed was the definition of our country since its founding.

Currently we have an administration and apparently a large segment of our population that is more concerned with retreating from global leadership, abandoning those of our citizens that are the most vulnerable, venerating the concept that being ‘other’ is a bad thing, encouraging hateful speech, treating others with disparagement, and venerating selfishness and greed over all.  Lying is now OK.  Facts are not important anymore. Truth is not an absolute.  Alternate reality is accepted without question.  Questioning is not relevant.

When I look at the makeup of our government, the people who supposedly ‘represent’ us and make decisions and supposedly are charged with finding solutions to our common challenges as a nation, I am saddened.  Consider the new people running our country….(I suppose the good news is that they are relatively limited in number so far..the myriad appointments of leaders demanded by a change of leadership have thus far been woefully insufficient.)  And yet even with this dearth of ‘leadership’ we still have pivoted to a course where our reputation and perception in the world is spiraling down.  The immutable perception that America stands for justice, liberty, freedom, truth, global leadership and most of all intelligent compassion is disintegrating before our very eyes.

There seems to only be irrational praise and obsequiousness to a man who is not terribly intelligent and perhaps one of the crudest personalities ever unleashed on the world.  Those who revere him deny truth, deny fact, and have a purview that is limited by it’s selfishness, greed, and self-aggrandizement. 

Actually making decisions based on fact and the likelihood of successful outcomes is not important—witness the recently ‘hailed’ American Healthcare Act.  Stabbing 23 million people in the back is apparently OK with the majority of our ‘representatives’ in the House.  Can anyone explain to me why positions of the American populace, as a whole, on issues like Gun Control; Global Climate Change; prioritizing clean energy initiatives; funding for scientific research; advances in education; fixing our decaying infrastructure have been shown to be clearly above 50, 60, 70 or 80%, and yet our ‘representatives’ vote over and over to disregard those findings.  Something is rotten in the voting booth!

What about the slew of Executive Orders that among other things, approve the release of more pollutants into the environment; attempt to unconstitutionally ban a religion from entering our borders, approve the ejection of law abiding non-citizen immigrants from our country without regard to breaking up families;  unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords;  attempt to cut off support for Planned Parenthood leaving millions of the most vulnerable without pre-natal care, cancer pre-screening, and birth control.

With each action, with each lie, with each misdirection, obfuscation and distraction, we are becoming less and less of what I thought being an American in the world was all about.  I am suddenly ashamed to be considered part of the ‘New America’.

Unless those of us who share that shame can get our act together, our American-ness will surely evolve into being a pariah-state in our relationship with the rest of the world.  Our youth will grow up believing distorted truths and inculcating distorted values, and then there will be only history to record what we used to be.