Opinion/Editorial
THE WINDS OF WAR

This will be the last editorial written in this weekly paper prior to the coming election next week.  What does this contentious election portend for the future of not only the country but even places as small and rurally located as the communities surrounding Geneva Lake?  The amount of extreme emotional polarization that has been mounted by mass media, social media, radio, television of all kinds, and even cell phone technology is like nothing that has ever come before across the entirety of residency of members of the human species on planet earth.  Communication in such a saturating way has changed everything, and the changes are, for the most part, poorly understood.  It was posited many years ago that the invention of the Internet (it used to be called the Web) would allow for everyone coming into contact with it to be able to access and discover the truth.  About almost everything.  That is not what has happened, and, in fact, it is not something that is even close to the truth.

The advent of such ranging, penetrating, and intrusive data incursions on almost every member of the American society has had almost nothing to do with giving the public much of any truth. There is no question that the first politician to fully realize how much of a giant “soft spot,” for transmitted and much-believed fabrication, is named Donald Trump. On Tuesday of next week, the public will decide just how much it wants to continue to be fooled by this man. Coming straight out of silver-spoon existence onto a stage of artificial reality television show this man almost single-handedly converted the delivery of information into an entirely different communications vessel. That “ship of state” now sailing the American “seas” is disinformation, conspiracy theory, and covert racism disguised as making America safer. In one of his latest rallies, where everyone gathers to celebrate not wearing masks or social distancing, Donald Trump actually said: “We’ve got to take America back.” Take it back from whom? Has this man so lost it that he’s unaware that he is asking the voters to elect him to take the country back from himself? He’s aware. He’s also aware that once his followers are committed to believing in him then not much else matters.

Never ever forget a lesson that should have been well incorporated into all social theory since that time. Jonestown. Jim Jones got a thousand people to believe in him. He then, when threatened, told them all to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Nine hundred and nine of his followers died (including Mr. Jones). They took their children with them (over 300). The framers of the brilliant U.S. Constitution wrote that document so that people would follow the law and not other individual persons. The framers, living well before Jonestown, understood the inherent danger in appointing some individual as the savior and then following that person blindly. Vote on Tuesday. Do not vote for the “savior.” Vote for the Constitution and the other man running who is not claiming to be the “one,” the savior, or any of what our forefathers were so worried about.

The Supreme Court has been tilted so far to the right that it would appear Roe V. Wade will fall, Obamacare will be rejected and done away with, while election restrictions will intensify, favoring those who are landed, wealthy and possessed of all those things the majority of the population are not. The democrats were not able to convince Ginzberg to resign so a liberal balance could be maintained on the court. That RGB herself, highly thought of as she was, could not see and go along with such a plan is disappointing. The only balance possible now, following the SCOTUS vote is through voting on November 3rd.

Vote, no matter what.

~~James Strauss