Further Comments on the Absolutely Disgrceful

Well, it’s over, “it” being the election, but of course it will probably never truly be over if “it” refers to the divide between the current Republican Party and our newly re-elected President. Apparently the color of one’s skin is more important to a large segment of the American population than the reality of performance. Obama has not, objectively viewed, been a bad President. He managed to accomplish a great deal in spite of being blackballed by the Republicans who opposed virtually everything he tried to do. If they had cooperated the unemployment rate would be far less than it currently is. The Republican scheme to make sure Obama would be a one term President has failed, and it failed in spite of the millions of Pac money that was employed against him. It also failed in spite of all their attempts to suppress the vote. Their strategy seems to have backfired. Some optimistic souls seem to believe that Obama now has a mandate that Republicans will have to honor and thus begin to cooperate. I’m not so sure this will happen, their hatred of Obama runs too deep. You will have noticed, of course, that the greatest opposition to his re-election came from the former slave states where civil war memories apparently still linger. I would like to believe Republicans will have learned a lesson, begin to cooperate, and that our country can move forward toward solving the many problems that beset us, but I am doubtful.

But back to the absolutely disgraceful; I failed to mention previously the problem of the electoral votes as opposed to the popular vote. If, like me, you live in a non-swing state, your vote is basically meaningless while those of voters in swing states are all important. This is, of course, rather disgraceful as for all intents and purposes it means that the majority of voters are disenfranchised. A Democratic vote in a place like Idaho means nothing at all, you might as well not even bother to vote. The electoral vote should be abolished in favor of the popular vote. But of course that may not be a very good solution when you consider the reasons that many people vote, things like who you might want to have a beer with, how handsome the candidate is, how your family has always voted in the past, and, unfortunately, the candidate’s race or ethnicity. A viable democracy depends upon an informed public and nowadays, unhappily, you cannot depend upon how informed the average voter may be because of the media that features such loudmouth hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck, and that also feature others like Palin, Coulter, and others who either know very little or speak only for the shock value of their remarks. The American public has been systematically “dumbed down” to the point where the value of their opinions is highly questionable. The continued presence of some members of Congress who are themselves so incredibly ill-informed and even downright stupid seems to prove the point. When they refuse to even believe in science and prefer to trust in the bible you know we are in real trouble, global warming and evolution are real, not just make believe, race is not a measure of intelligence, nor is gender. The earth was not created in six days, 6000 years ago, people did not ride on dinosaurs. The warfare between science and theology should have been settled long ago, the fact that it seems to still linger on in the United States makes us little more than a laughingstock among industrialized nations and certainly contributes to our idiotic inability to deal with reality.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

George Bernard Shaw