This is Reality? I am old enough to remember when the U.S. government was being run by adults. That was also true for most of the governments in the so-called civilized world—we had International differences of opinion about forms of government and territorial concerns. Most of us agreed with some of them and disagreed with others, but we were fairly certain that most countries were making decisions about government by relatively rational means, with military conflict being a last resort.
Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, describes an alternative universe in which nothing is what it seems. Alice had entered the “wonderland” by falling down a rabbit hole. The current situation in the States seems bizarre by what used to be normal political governance. Liberals and conservatives disagreed about best courses of action, but they usually shared many commonalities of belief. That no longer seems to be the case. We “the people” seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole.
Some of our difficulties are the logical result of the form of political maneuvering known as gerrymandering, which has (like all other life forms) grown out of control. Gerrymandering tends to reduce the the checks and balances of two-party governance. At its extreme, it can result in a virtual monarchy, with the president and his (or her) political party having all the power. At that point, they can essentially point at their opposition and cry, “Off with their heads.” Fortunately, our political system has built-in checks and balances to have (at least so far) to have stopped our slide down the slippery slope to the bottom of the rabbit hole. But at this point we are barely hanging on the the edge of the world as we have known it, and, although the last election suggests that we (collectively) have rejected a full descent, it is not at all clear that we can avoid further descent into darkness.
I am old enough to remember when the Democrats were the party of racial discrimination and Republicans were attempting to bring more people into democratic political process. Eisenhower was my idea of what a Republican should be. His vice president, however, Richard Nixon, anticipated the future of the current Republican Party. While it is a simplistic and less-than-fully accurate analysis, the Republicans focused on doing what they could to make the rich richer. They were successful in persuading many to vote against their own best interests by using well-known “triggers” (such as race and “fear of other”) to persuade voters with “issues”: The battlecry was vote for the Republican to stem the tide of “others” who are after your job, your land, your daughters, etc.
In the last election, that seems to have shifted at least a bit. In the most recent election, a majority of voters rejected the current Republican vision of enriching the few at the expense of the many. The few, however, still have enough political power to prevent the majority from creating the kind of change that would result in greater equality and more opportunities for those who have been without. The Republicans have demonstrated Lord Acton‘s Dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” We have increasingly been proving Lord Acton correct. This is true not only in the States but in many countries of the world: Russia, China, and North Korea among them. It is also true in other countries, of course, but there aren’t many large enough and powerful enough to cause trouble on the “world stage.”
The problem, of course, isn’t the Republican Party or the political philosophies espoused by the various “trouble-makers” on the world stage. A long time ago, a cartoon character named Pogo, created by Walt Kelly, famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Humans are, for the most part, both selfish and greedy. This isn’t recent. We have been that way from the start. Although the degree to which that seems true for humans doesn’t seem apply equally to all species, humans are the ones who have the greatest impact on the rest of the environment. A lion, for example, might kill more than it can eat (and perhaps feed her cubs or others in a pride), nothing would be wasted, however. Anything left would be eaten by smaller animals and insects. When everything had been eaten, whatever was left would become fertilizer for plant life.
Humans are the ones who have made a mess of the environment. (We are totally responsible, for example, for all the plastic in the world’s oceans.) The earth did, of course, experience climate change before humans arrived on the scene (just ask the dinosaurs), and the climate would have doubtless continued to change even without the interference of humans. It is hard to say what our climate would be like now if we hadn’t been so busy using fossil fuels for heat, cooling, and transportation. Nearly everything we do is supported by energy based on “natural resources.” Although the computer I am using to prepare this blog entry doesn’t use much in the way of energy, it does use some. The television I will watch this evening also uses energy.
Currently, most of the energy we use is based on fossil fuels. Wind farms use the wind to create energy in much the same way dams produce hydro-electric energy, and humans are clever enough that as the costs of using fossil fuels go up, alternatives will continue to be developed. It remains to be seen whether the forces for positive change will be faster and stronger than human greed and corruption.
If we want humanity and other mammalian life forms to survive, we need to start paying serious attention to the choices we are making. We need to start voting as though our lives depended on it. We need to recognize that not everyone who says, “Vote for me,” has our best interests in mind, and that not voting is still a vote.
