Opinion/Editorial
THE WINDS OF CHANGE
Politics is a word frequently denied attention in our ever-present, right here, in your face, lonely world of electronic interconnectedness. More and more people, comprising a growing minority of America’s population, are evidencing a great distaste for discussing, participating in, or even being aware of what is going on politically across the country. This spreading lack of interest is working. Fringe elements come into their own when fringe minorities of cramped and twisted belief systems bound to dead-end philosophies of life are able to swell themselves up and make-believe they are the majority in a majority-ruled culture.
“Good men doing nothing” is a paraphrased part of an old expression intending to inform us all that if good people do not respond and come forward then evil will be the natural result. The truth of this axiomatic saying seems to be self-explanatory, but it really isn’t. Anything can result. Failure, almost certainly, but then one must define what success and failure are before one can even come to that conclusion. When good people step away there is a presumption that the remaining humans gathered together are evil. The remaining people can be like some of our current representatives serving in the House of Representatives, however. They can merely be dumb. They can be uneducated, obnoxious, and quite likely be stupid. There are no I.Q. qualifier or educational status necessary to serve in our country’s elected positions of leadership…those positions together composed and melded into definition by the word ‘politics.’
Will America pay its bills? Will America continue to make good on the promises it’s made to its own people and then to foreigners who’ve counted on the word of the United States to carry them along for hundreds of years? Will the winds of a new financial bonfire swirl about, throwing flaming cinders and punishing smoke all around the world in a chaotic unpredictable fashion? We can’t answer those questions. None of us can answer those questions because the world has never been involved in anything like the current situation. There’s never been anything like the pandemic or the nation’s response to it. There has been a war like the one being fought in Ukraine right now, but almost no one in our current leadership circumstance has ever had to deal with this kind of wanton, depraved, and downright genocidal form of warfare that has the active potential at any time to turn into a nuclear winter.
The elected members of America’s House of Representatives are supposed to be placed in their positions to care. Right here and right now the entire world is getting to watch these wealthy conservative representatives (yes, and a few liberals, as well) give the nation a lesson in horrific judgment and lack of care. They give every appearance of not giving a damn about anything but their own power, money, and lives. The nation stands on the edge of a precipice and stares down into a crevasse of unknown depth. This is a new place for America, and it has never been on the lip of such a deadly chasm before. Previous financial collapses, disease, and wars of which there have been only several, although not this severe, have not occurred out of such intended deliberation and cold calculation. We are quite willingly risking the security of the entire planet for almost nothing, and we the people who elected these men and women are not in charge of either changing, stopping, or preserving ourselves from the disastrous potential effects.
We are living this very minute in a time when the winds of change are building to an extent we’ve never witnessed in our lives. We all know and understand wind. It cannot be controlled once it develops, and its quixotic effects cannot be predicted with any certainty. If polled, no self-respecting public would ever vote to lose such potentially catastrophic winds, and current polls bear that out. But our conservative representatives are not controlled or deeply affected by national polls. They are driven by huge conservative funding sources and small pockets of near-demented selfish burrows carefully crafted and cut from the very stable fabric of the nation’s central fiber. We cannot stop them, and we can only hope that the winds will somehow be diminished by the time they reach our shores. Through accommodation, surrender to extortion, and acceptance of utter fraud the winds may moderate or be deflected. Those already damaged by the ‘surge’ before these winds can hope to be ‘cured’ retroactively but will the balance of America’s delicate triumvirate of political leadership be so fortunate?
We cannot know. We can only wait as we face the building storm effects of these unknown winds blowing at speeds and in directions beyond our comprehension.