Election 2014: Delay Of The Inevitable
This current election mirrors the times. People are unhappy for many different reasons. Everything is changing so fast, and so many potentially dire threats to our planet and our natural environment are coming from different directions all at once. We are like deer frozen in the headlights. And there are so many of us now on earth that the resources simply are not there for all earthly human inhabitants to live a life style the affluent now live. No one really denies if the human population doubles again, like it has in my lifetime, that this is going to be trouble.
We understand a lot of things in principle, but we choose not to act on these long term threats, but instead use our energies to protect our own immediate self-serving needs. We spend money by borrowing it, knowing that the next generation will have to pay off the debt, one way or another. And we do this at the same time telling ourselves and others how much our children mean to us. We often adopt family values as our religion even though we know every major religion is based on ‘we are all God’s children’. Ok, that sounds nice, but in reality we tend to act like only our own family is important. Why else would we favor a system in which the amount of money to educate children varies widely?
We fight wars in which we cannot win because in the past wars did produce winners and losers. And we keep spending more and more on weapons which are extremely expensive and useless in modern wars. What good is an atomic bomb or a zillion drones in the war against terrorism? Totally useless, unless we are gong to exterminate the entire population of a country. Maybe it will come to that. With the internet how do we propose to stop Terrorists from becoming cohesive groups without ever meeting in person in any particular place? We fight wars in which we are the only combatants in uniform. That’s a difficult conundrum. And how can the affluent, who control global and domestic operations, those who have much to protect, win any long term wars against those with nothing to lose?
And who are the terrorists anyway? Mostly they are people oppressed with little hope of things getting better for them, and they fight with whatever means at hand, and don’t care about the risks because they have nothing left to lose. Those with wealth are amassing more wealth at an exponential rate across the globe, regardless of what form of government. And that ever increasing addictive need for more wealth has to come from the middle class. It cannot come from the poor because the poor have nothing left to give, and have so little that they don’t even have to pay income taxes. Thus, for this appetite of the rich to become even richer, this enough is never enough money has to come from the middle class, and this appetite pushes more of the middle class into poverty. These addicted to wealth individuals are just as much terrorists as the poorest suicide bombers who strap bombs to themselves or plant bombs, or become snipers, etc. When anyone is extracting wealth from others, because they have the power to do so, not because of any legitimate exchange for goods or services, they are terrorists. It is simply unearned wealth, wealth earned only because they have the political power to take this wealth.
There is less of a community mentality today than ever before. People to people contact is mostly through electronic gadgets, and this communication between the same people instantly over and over throughout the day provides precious little time for any serious thoughts about the varied aspects of life. We barely know most of those around us. We only know those at the other end of our gadgets, and they exist so we never have need to contemplate things much. People cannot be on a bus, train, walking, or in a store without someone chatting to them over a gadget. It is not just an information overload, but a useless information overload. The tower of Babel is in our ears or in front of our eyes most of the day.
It may seem strange that the 1-5 percenters, who own like 90% of the wealth in this country, can manage to convince so many others of the middle and poor class to vote for the candidates they financially bankroll. Why would so many people vote against their own economic welfare?
Everybody knows that the poor, as well as the non poor, have a lot of personal prejudices, prejudices which have a lot of meaning to them. The wealthy use these prejudices to get a lot of people to vote for their candidate. We have birth control, gun rights, abortion, gay marriage, drug abuse,
patriotism, and so on, PLUS it is ever so easy to get many people to blame the existence of all kinds of minorities as the reason life is getting worse for them financially. There is little more pitiful than some marginally affluent person voting Republican because it gives them some sort of ego boost to feel they are more elite, not a part of the riff-raff they so detest.
So somebody will win this election and the Republicans will control both houses of congress or they will not. It matters little since nothing much is going to change or happen either way. Each party can block all important legislation at will whether they are the majority or not. So we are likely to limp along for the next couple of years and the day after this election the next election will start and the millions upon millions of dollars will begin to be collected by both parties. Buying elections has become a major industry in this country.
If the Republicans win the election for President in 2016 they lose since then they have to actually correct the problems they created, and will reap the pent up anger of so many, an anger kept under wraps because Obama was president and most of the poor and minorities had hope and kept patient. But the massive movement of money to the already very rich has continued and with the Republicans in charge the chaos and third world like guerrilla domestic terrorism will spring up and grow like a weed. The Republicans simply have no plan whatsoever to stop the flow of money to the already rich. In fact that is precisely their main goal. The Koch Brothers and their ilk didn’t spend millions to get their ‘kind’ elected to have any reasonable regulation and limits to their capitalistic ventures. Capitalism is the best system yet devised except it can’t work well very long without reasonable regulations and set limits for profits. Those losing the battle for a share of the economic pie are not going to wait much longer. They are getting more restless. Human overpopulation is going to suffer the same consequences any other species suffers from over population. Mother Nature bats last and she is certainly now in the warm up circle. Evolution will survive and we cannot predict how long or how severe the correction will be. Evolution has never worked on human time and there could be millions of years pass by before things begin to wend upward again. Humans now have the knowledge and brain power to prevent damage to the environment but we don’t have any real inclination to do so. Responsible reproduction is not even mentioned in political debates.
For the first time in evolutionary history a species possesses the inherent intelligence to prevent many kinds of catastrophic situations which can cause major environmental changes. But intelligence and the will to use that intelligence are two separate things. We all really do know that the only constants in life are change, diversity, and luck. We all really do know that the Golden Rule is the basis for ethics. Every culture everywhere realizes the Golden Rule as an ethical concept. But what we really know and what we really do are often a disconnect. Maybe that is why every major religion has invented the concept of forgiveness so that Heaven can still be achieved. The human system of ethics has improved over time just like physical traits improve over time. Humans have, in theory, the basis to make life more contented for everyone and other species too, but we are still too wedded to circling the wagons, inventing family values, using inherited religious dogmas for our ethics, the our country right or wrong mentality, ethical and cultural allegiances, and all sorts of self serving biases which serve to make the Golden Rule inoperable. When all is said and done, the immediate future looks bumpy, if not setting the stage for a dire evolutionary correction, BUT the long term future of evolution will proceed as it has for billions of years. I know, that’s fine but it doesn’t include us. That’s ok, none of us are in an apoplectic state because we were not present for all the millions of years which preceded us, and I reckon there is no need to become apoplectic about not being present for the millions of years in the future. “Thus, that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.” Epictetus (Greek philosopher).
