Opinion/Editorial
JUST WAIT, THINGS WILL GET BETTER
The erosion of a long-established line of integrity is taking place ever so slowly, as we live our lives in America. Oh, it’s not just the election and the most lying president of all time (don’t ever forget to read up a bit on the Hayes/Tilden election a long time ago), no, it’s deeper than that. Examples stick out here and there and everywhere.
Take eBay, for example. The key feature of eBay, that was so wonderful early on, was the rating of sellers and buyers. People could ding others for not performing or the product not performing, or not paying. It was a big deal to attempt to remain pristine and without bad ratings in that regard. Not anymore. A not so subtle change in the rules basically threw out the importance of ratings. Now, eBay is anything goes, and if something goes wrong that’s basically it. eBay was a developing bastion of the power of integrity in business. Then it got really big. It dumped integrity for money, pure and simple. How about this president and the office? For a long long time, that office was known for being very careful about misrepresentations and downright lies. How did it come to be that it doesn’t matter anymore? That’s an erosion of ethics and integrity…and the erosion, although driven from positions of power, is one of the people. Acceptance of a lack of integrity is a form of no longer having it.
Cell phone company service and billing no longer have any integrity in them at all. The companies merely lie about what towers they have turned on and also about what charges might be. They use the complexity of the technology to bamboozle the public, and the public is allowing that to work. What is true when there is no apparent truth? What happens is what is happening today. Nobody is believing anything anymore, instead just quietly trying to go along and get along until ‘things get better.’ The virus presentation of ‘news’ has been so awful how can anyone make sense of believing the figures and results on national television all the time? Seven million people have been infected, but they make it sound, day after day, like those infected in the past still are!
That can’t be. They are talking mostly about the past and presenting it as the present. The percentage of people who have died is very small compared to other deaths, or the population as a whole, but that is not stressed, and no real evidence about those who’ve died having died as a direct cause of the virus either. The public figures that out and does what the public is doing right now. What you are probably doing right now…remaining calm, quiet, and waiting for ‘things to get better.’ Most of the country thought that there would be a revolution when the republicans and Hayes stole the election right out from under Tilden. There was no revolution. The cause of truly giving the black population real freedom was set back for decades but the public simply remained calm, quietly went along, and waited for ‘things to get better.’ Don’t count on much coming out of this coming election, although you can probably count on the fact that things will probably get better some time after you and I are long gone.
There will be severe consequences likely when the election result issue is finally settled in November. If it is settled in November. In the late 1800s, the end of reconstruction, a word used to describe the freeing of and freedom of former slaves in America ended with the hustled, tricked, and unpopular election of Rutherford Hayes. That election, couched much the same as the current ones, was feared to be so rotten and so filled with high emotion that revolution was feared. There was no revolution but racial parity for the former slaves was never to be in their lifetimes because of it. In fact, that single decision, with the unabashed and unashamed support of the Supreme Court of the time, ensured that racial injustice remains with us to this very day. Democracy, and the bending and corruption it can be forced to accept and internalize, is only a framework and system. The framework and system are heavily influenced by the men and women who enforce and rule it. These men and women are not always principled, fair, or even well-mannered or nice. They can be much like the current executive leadership of the country.
The American taxation system is another social organ requiring adherence to a moral code, because every transaction, every investment, and every deduction a citizen makes in calculating the tax owed cannot be followed or examined. Certain ethics is required to allow the country to run economically comfortable at all. The current leader of America paid $750.00 in taxes in 2016, the year of his election. This is the same man who states that he is a billionaire and working with billions more in all manner of loans and investments. In 2017 he paid nothing. Over the years he’s paid almost nothing compared to his declared worth. What kind of evidence is the USA looking for in deciding on leadership a month and four days away?
Just wait, things will get better?
They may well get better but you better vote to attempt to assure that.
Getting Better
