Does the 2016 Presidential Election Really Matter?
There has never really been an election like this. Political leaders are used to determining who their candidate for President will be. Not any more. There used to be political conventions which did the choosing, and then a campaign for two months. Not any more. Fringe candidates rarely got a chance unless the conventions were deadlocked. Not any more. Every ego fueled with strong feelings and little substance can be in the headlines for years, campaigning for money, a lot of it going directly into their own bank account, even when getting nominated is farfetched. Elections today are the political version of the Jerry Springer Show.
The Democrats lucked out in that there are only two candidates and the debates could be issue oriented. The Republicans unintentionally created some kind of Dating Game/American Idol combination—where they pitch everything to stir up the worst prejudices of voters, and even cough up nasty little degrading nicknames for each other.
How many persons really qualified to be President would even consider going through such a process which lasts a couple of years? If you weren’t deranged when you started, you would be by the end. It does seem that Bernie Sanders is too old (my age) to be racing around all over the country, every day, everywhere, and trying to be mentally sharp enough to compete on a debate stage. Maybe after his first stroke, and left with babbling apoplectic anger fits, he will switch parties to fit in better.
What will, when all is said and done, and more said than done, be the result? For a start, all the ‘issues’ being discussed are short term nuances in the evolutionary process. It is the issues not discussed which will determine the future of our planet. Thus, in the long run, it really doesn’t matter who wins. Let’s come back to that later in this musing.
So what about the short run? Whose base would we rather get really pissed off? The conservatives or the liberals? Both groups have an intellectual base and both groups have an ever growing ‘nobody’s home’ crowd. The Conservatives have their ‘crucify the heathens’ rural ghetto mob of various ilk, while the liberals have the urban ghetto ilk. It doesn’t take much insight to correctly pick which camp has those most likely to throw caution to the wind, take to the streets and create chaos. No one seems to understand to what extent all these ‘smart phones’ and other gadgets will, at some point, alter the nature of street riots. They will soon become very organized riots, in the sense that while the police can’t be everywhere (or the national guard), the rioters can be quickly be programmed to be where the police or national guard are not. Riots will be breaking out all over in a coordinated fashion and things can go down rapidly when this happens. No one will be safe. And as always, those with nothing to lose will win, and those with much to protect will lose. This has a strong historical background.
Anyone my age just hopes for reasonable calm another ten years. In that respect, us affluent better hope the democrats win. The Republican conservatives will squeal like pigs but their pacifiers (the trough of food and THINGS) will be close by to calm them down a bit. But having said this, there is no real assurance a democrat victory will avoid street riots except in the very short term. Obama kept the ‘have nots’ relatively calm for ten years. But income inequality has continued to soar, especially in the United States, and so those at the economic bottom may well go berserk just out of economic frustration. Time will tell rather quickly in the next couple of years where this all goes.
Now back to the long run. The sequence of events about to be described are not Einsteinium in nature. It is not a matter of intelligence. It is more a matter of see no evil, hear no evil. It is like a mother who knows one of her children is rotten to the core, but can never bring herself to admit it. We see such a parent all the time on TV telling the press “My kid would never do a terrible thing like this. It is all a mistake.” This is just a sad, but realistic, aspect of human nature.
Hardly anyone will deny that letting the human population of our planet double, like it has in my lifetime, will be disastrous. Even today, there are not the natural resources available for every person on the planet to live the kind of affluent life that I and others now live. We learn in Biology 101 that every species pays a disastrous price for overpopulation. This basic and major issue is never discussed in any Presidential debates by anyone. Without drastic measures to control human population on the globe, nothing else in any party platform really matters much in the long run. As the human population continues to surge ahead Donald Trump is going to be pretty busy having Mexico and other countries building real high walls to keep others in/out. I wonder how far down his walls will go, because the usual way these days through walls is to go under them in tunnels.
This musing could end right here since there really is no alternative to stopping human overpopulation on our planet. But we might just mention another immediate issue which needs attention, and no one talks about it. There can be no decent living wages for all workers anywhere in a global economy until there are global minimum wages. We could declare everyone in America must be paid $20 an hr but then how can we sell any goods produced abroad? Could America really be self sufficient if it simply stopped trading with other countries? How long can most workers in this country hang on when more and more the trend is to lower job security via individual year by year contracts, reduce pensions, leave social security ripe for disaster, refuse to guarantee good health care for every child (and adult), refuse to spend the same amount of money to educate every child, have unemployment rates in many rural and ghetto areas hover around 60-70%, continue to spend more money on military matters than all the other top industrialized countries combined, and allow income inequality to increase exponentially? How can all this not be a ticket to national disaster?
So while the candidates in both parties pull our emotional strings on cultural, religious, and racial matters, matters which will bring about some kind of massive evolutionary correction to our planet’s situation— the important matters will be ignored while we get apoplectic about all these in our face hot button issues. Rome is getting ready to burn.
Even climate change, which is starting to be addressed, is rather certain about to be too little, too late. It took more than half a century of ever increasing use of energy and other natural resources to bring us close to the tipping point here, and it would take another half century to reverse it, and only if human population is made to decline. Imagine taking a purely scientific matter, such as climate change, and letting the general population vote their feelings about it? Now really, how many of us could even give a 5 minute knowledgeable lecture on the science of climate change? No matter how many doctorate degrees we have, unless it is in the area of climate change, we know as much about it as the person who gives you change at the grocery store. All we have are feelings about the whole matter. Riva the horse has feelings. So why can’t she vote?
The issues which people tend to have the strongest convictions, in today’s world, are the issues which are most determined by feelings. Thus religious beliefs generate strong feelings, gay marriage elicits strong feelings, right to carry guns around are seeped in feelings, who will win a sports contest is saturated with feelings, the legality of marijuana is wrapped in strong feelings, and so it goes—many people are a bundle of feelings—in many cases created by the constant media input from various electronic devices. The issues discussed in this musings have little to do with feelings, and everything to do with logic and scientific data. In a world population increasingly operating on pure personal feelings, these logical and scientific issues are less and less issues of any real focus.
It is clear that humans do not today have the foresight to limit their own population on our globe. It is also clear that today there is not even a remote chance that there will be a global minimum wage. It clear that we have already passed the point where we have the time and circumstance to prevent climate change. So what will really happen in the long run? Will the future on this planet still have humans as the most developed species? Will the human species become extinct like the dinosaurs? Will a new species involve in which humans are no longer the dominant species? All these questions are beyond human prediction. It is hard to envision how the human species could possibly co-exist with a new and higher life form species. What is for sure is that human overpopulation will cease—and probably through violent pitched battles for the limited natural resources needed for human survival. Maybe evolution will not proceed via a new dominant species but an improved human species in which further advancement of life on this planet will be via machines or gadgets which make human work, mental or physical, almost incidental---but this would kind of make us obsolete wouldn't it?
Let’s stick with this a minute. Human overpopulation of the globe is already here. Will humans solve this in some sort of chaotic genocidal fashion? Will weapons of mass destruction be our Waterloo? Will some sort of climate change, for whatever reasons, be our Waterloo? Will some sort of microbial infection run rampant across the globe and exterminate us like it virtually did to the American Indians? Will terrorism become so sophisticated and accessible to most any angry group that any human genocide becomes basically mass terrorism from multiple directions? For example, our best success to date against terrorist groups has been drones to take out the leaders, one after another. Trouble is, these leaders get replaced readily one after another. If we can locate an address for our target, we can take them out with smart drones which will deliver a bomb practically right up their ass. But what happens when various groups get the capability to make their own drones? UPS is already talking about using drones in the future to deliver packages right to your home. That’s nice except suppose someone wants to send an explosive bomb instead, and has drone capability. What’s to stop drones from being sold on the black market? We already have generated ‘stand your ground’ laws which essentially legalize murder as long we feel our life has been threatened. There are so many people whose lives are so unrewarding, for so many different reasons, who choose now to take their own lives and take as many others with them—the others often being anyone around the site of their massacre. A sort of generic mass murder. Most don’t even plan for any escape, just kill as many as they can before the police take them out. How is any world leader of any ilk going to be protected from drones? Do we really realize what kind of multiple potentials exist out there for chaotic human genocide?
We seem to think that income inequality and inequality of living environments is just another political issue to be decided at the ballot box. Based on the daily news reports, more and more people, at an exponential rate, are modifying the stand your ground concept as a personal choice to generate death as their own public way to offer—if necessary, their own death as means to take out an immediate irritant or just generic human lives in general. Most of us probably haven’t made a list yet of how many drones or explosive devices we will need if the ‘shit hits the fan’ in any chaotic breakdown of civilized order.
Clearly, something has to give, and not in some far distant future. Humans have lost control of their own civilized destiny. If we wonder why this coming Presidential election is so strange and volatile, we only have to more closely observe what a global human overpopulation really begins to look like. The more overpopulated the human species becomes, the cheaper individual lives become, the more it becomes every person and group for themselves. The only thing for certain is that the human species will be reduced in number one way or another. Evolution will proceed. It is just unimaginable the direction and how long any massive evolutionary correction will take. We tend to think in terms of our own lifetime, and are not too good at predicting corrections which sometimes take millions of years.
In my life time humans have gotten really smart in some areas, and yet remain amazingly dumb in other areas. None of us, individually or collectively as a species, are controlling the evolutionary process. We like to think otherwise. The laws which God (however you choose to define God) created to control the process will continue to operate. We all prance around and do our little thing for a minuscule period of time in evolutionary history. Our human activities have gotten out of hand to the extent we are currently in the midst of the 5th or 6th massive species extinction rate in all of evolutionary history. Mother Nature bats last. The only thing for certain is that Time will stay, we will Go, and what will be the historical story on our species is anyone’s guess. Neither Sheebiejiebee the cat or Riva the Horse seem to give a shit about these issues. In this sense they are smarter than me. Frankly, at my age why should I either?
