PrintHow did we go so wrong?
Recently, I considered the many technological, medical, and scientific marvels we have and routinely use in our everyday lives. These days, it isn't a major event or a costly undertaking to call someone long-distance. Phone calls, text messages, and even video calls around the world are an everyday practice. Whereas just a few decades ago, we waited for news from loved ones in a neighboring state or serving overseas to be delivered by the mail, we can now talk, laugh, or cry with them in real time, via the internet.
The newest motion pictures and television entertainment are available on demand at any time of the day, wirelessly or via fiber optic cable, on computers, telephones, or televisions with screens the size of walls. News is available to us online or on TV, 24/7, and we expect to see live video coverage even if the event is happening half a world away.
So how is it that at this time of unparalleled advances, we find ourselves locked down, masked up, and further isolated from humanity, ostensibly for our protection, from a rather mundane virus that has a 99.5% survival rate, according to our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? The one word answer: politics.
The late Charles Krauthammer stated, quite accurately, that "you can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933." This is also the USA in 2021.
Today, we have a political party in power that throws around words like "science" but deliberately ignores actual scientific methods and evidence, and tries to convince us that boys can be girls just by saying so; that babies in the womb aren't actually people; that homosexuality is somehow not a choice, despite no evidence to the contrary; and that "peaceful protests" can include arson, looting, shootings, and even death. Our culture and our nation are being infected from a self-inflicted wound, perpetrated by elected foolish and selfish elected representatives who cater to feelings not facts. Welcome to the modern Democratic party.
The COVID-19 "pandemic" (which just means that a disease has spread to all continents, not that it's more deadly than any other) has an extremely high recovery and survival rate, yet we've been cowed into believing that this is the greatest threat to mankind in our recorded history. Many of our elected officials have responded by implementing stunningly idiotic and draconian restrictions that have succeeded only in wrecking our economy, spreading irrational panic, and disrupting our lives and livelihoods, while COVID cases increase. Apparently, the disease is impervious to the actions of bureaucratic imbeciles. Nevertheless, the fools who implemented alleged cures routinely pat themselves on the back for their completely worthless, liberty-stealing decrees, and then they pass the blame and do their best to isolate themselves from the rest of us who are truly suffering due to their actions.
Not content to dismantle our society with a mild virus akin to a bad case of the flu, many of those elected officials doubled down on stupid last summer when a group of misled domestic terrorists rioted over the death of George Floyd, a petty criminal whose eternal claim to fame will be not as a civil rights hero, but as a thug who resisted arrest with lethal amounts of drugs in his body. Breonna Taylor was another martyred saint-in-waiting, until the truth came out about her vocation as an assistant to a drug-dealer that led to her demise. Instead of rightly chastising these two, we were told that "systemic racism" was the cause of their deaths and that we needed to atone for this through financial reparations based solely on race. We were forced to endure endless lectures about our "white privilege" and put up with the accompanying arson, looting, vandalism, and assorted destruction in our cities from the community of these alleged victims of systemic racism.
We've come so far from the hardscrabble lifestyles of our ancestors just a century ago, yet we're still dealing with tyrants, miscreants, and people of low moral character who've been elected to high political office and are determined to drag us backward in order to meet their delusional beliefs about climate, economics, sexuality, education, etc. Many, such as the stunningly vapid and ignorant yet pompous Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are singing the siren song of socialism to poorly educated young people who haven't grasped the connections among capitalism, liberty, and technological advances. They're demanding restrictive regulations and taxpayer money (of course) designed only to sooth hurt feelings of a vocal and perpetually aggrieved minority.
It's been said many times in our nation's history, and especially during our Civil War over a century ago, that there is reason to fear that the American Experiment is at risk of failing. Some of us have grown so pampered in our often selfish and shortsighted demands of how we think the world should treat us and others that we've unwisely elected would-be dictators to lead our cities, states, and nation. They continue to browbeat us into believing that our progress is our original sin, and that we've been able to achieve our advances only through greed and the mistreatment of others.
Many of the events of 2020 were horrific for our country. They were largely preventable, or the collateral damage could've been contained and handled more effectively. Twenty twenty-one hasn't started any better because we're still cleaning up the mess made last year, and the radical left is in charge of much of our government. Nevertheless, I believe we can still turn our nation around when we realize that many of our alleged leaders should be voted out of office and their lies are exposed and corrected.
This is still a great country with amazing potential and an enviable history of progress, compassion, and decency. We need to celebrate that and encourage every American citizen to embrace the principles that made us great. Our nation's future will be determined by our present choices. We will either cater to fringe lunatics who demand that we bend our principles and laws to suit them, or reject such foolishness and protect and defend the Constitution as it was written by visionary men who fought and sometimes died for our unique form of self-government and the ensuing freedoms.
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