ajax18 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 18, 2020 12:52 am
I mentioned this idea when responding to Themis on how we could bring to pass an amicable divorce between conservative and liberal in this country and perhaps avoid a bloody and expensive attempt at revolution. We're not geographically separated as we were during the first Civil War. But we are separated geographically between rural and urban. We have different cultures, different values, and would probably both be happier under different laws and different governments.
So how do you offer those different rules to a diverse group of people who need different laws to be happiest? My thought is to limit the rules imposed by the federal government and leave most decisions up to the state and preferably county governments. If you want money for social welfare programs, you'll have to obtain that from money you collect within your own county. Do you want to ban guns? Again, you can ban them in your own county. Do you want to hold "mostly peaceful protests", defund the police, destroy property? You can do that in your own county where your party holds a majority and supports your right to protest. Will need money to build these destroyed properties back? Just tax the rich, but in your own county. Would you like to replace the police with social workers? You can do that as well but not in my county.
Do you think 40% unemployment is the better path than 0.04% casualties due to COVID? Maybe the places like California run better on the black market anyway. Just don't ask Florida to bail you out.
Do you want open borders and to be a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants? That's fine to. Take just as many as you'd like to pay for or exploit on your own. But if they know what's good for them, they'll stay out of my county and off my property.
We don't really have to impose our politics on each other. Most people in rural and urban areas have an idea of what they want. Just leave it up to the counties and at most up to the states. Keep the federal government very narrow and limited and we could all be happier.
ETA: I'm always stunned during presidential election years how little attention we pay to local issues and local politics. The amendments on some of these ballots were written in such obtuse and inscrutable legalese that even some very accomplished people admitted to me they had no idea what they were voting for. We don't talk about local issues nearly enough on talk radio. Why is that?
On that last bit, don't lump me in the "we" you're talking about. I pay as much attention to local issues as I do the presidential race. And if one can't read well enough to understand a proposed statutory amendment (many of ours are written by citizens), then we have a voters guide that explains what the proposed change does and how much it is expected to cost, as well as statements for and against. I'd suggest that with minimal effort on your part, you could be a fully informed voter.
You've been pushing this line for weeks now. The problem is you've become comfortable and lazy. Like far too many Americans, you've forgotten what it means to be a citizen. You come home with a paycheck and you think you've earned the whole thing all by yourself. You haven't. You have what you have as part of a society. And but for the combined efforts of millions, you wouldn't have crap. You want to suck on the teat of society's benefits without incurring the costs. We've gone a long ways from Churchill's "blood, sweat, toil and tears" to "you can't make me wear a mask." The founding fathers would find you a complete embarassment.
You are the source of your own unhappiness, and you are blind to it. The "freedom" you want is completely contradictory. You want the freedom to do whatever you want, but you want to be protected from anyone else exercising their freedom from interfering with yours.
You want to be left alone? That's fine. Take whatever wealth you have and get yourself a place way off the grid. Take nothing from anyone else -- not food, not water, not electricity, not roads -- nothing. Otherwise, you're just engaging in hypocritical whining.
You are more free right now. Today. Than those Vikings you romanticize. You have opportunities to make choices they never dreamed of. Yet all you do with your freedom is grouse on a message board about how little freedom you have.
You've let a bunch of rich folks convince you that I'm your mortal enemy. They got even richer peddling that BS to you. And they're going to keep sucking money out of your wallet while you whine about some black person, somewhere, getting a few bucks.
So, grow up, man. You don't get your perfect world, at least not until you die. (Good luck with that.) Join the adults in the grown up world where, despite our different points of view, we work things out because we have to. It's messy and it's disorganized, but we didn't build a wealthy nation by stomping our feet and whining every time we didn't get our way. It's a little harder to get along right now, as lots of people have made a bundle brainwashing people into believing their fellow Americans are an existential threat. Maybe look at some economic statistics and realize it hasn't been your fellow black and brown Americans who have been picking your pocket -- its Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdock who laugh at you all the way to the bank.
I doubt you'll take any of this to heart, because you're determined to be unhappy and to blame your unhappiness on me and other folks who don't agree with you on political issues. So, I'll just leave you with a little poem:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
And maybe just think about why John Donne was moved to say "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
