Growing up in an academic community, I have always been stuck with being an “elitist”. Watching our current affairs I can’t help but wonder how we got to such a state and I believe it began when we started to reward stupidity. The plaintiffs bar started this when they saw a great opportunity to earn contingent fees for representing idiots. The McDonalds hot coffee case seems to exemplify this, however there are so many cases it boggles the mind. By playing on the jurors emotions, a good litigator can now get huge rewards by posing the large heartless and rich corporation against the poor injured individual. The prevalence of these settlements has caused a large percentage of Americans to plan their retirement by either; winning a large settlement, or the lottery.
My father used to state; “half the population is below average intelligence”. This statement along with John Stuart Mills that : “Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservatives”, seems to explain a lot. The politicians have energized a large group of the less intelligent with their campaigns of hate, anger, intolerance, and lies. I fear for my country when I see that stupidity has climbed to the highest leaders in this country. In Minnesota we have a congresswoman who doesn’t know the difference between gross sales and net income and is basing her decisions on this lack of understanding. We have a governor that thinks he’s Presidential material, but has spent 8 years destroying health care for the poor, cutting education funding to the core, and forcing up real estate taxes by double digits, all so “he didn’t raise taxes”.
Realizing that taxes are the cost of living in a civilized society, we always used to argue about how to tax the other guy. Now we have a large population that thinks that all taxes are evil and should be eliminated. We demand an efficient government but are unwilling to pay a competitive wage to those working in government and continue to insult all those on the public payroll. The only time the deficit is mentioned is when someone doesn’t want to fund some other politicians’ project. No one says how they are going to cut the deficit without raising taxes, but all seem to say it is possible! The ferocity with which the “death” tax has been fought best shows who is in charge of the conservative agenda. Who better to tax than “rich dead people”? People object to taxes because they believe that they earned all their income themselves. They don’t seem to realize that their income wouldn’t have been earned and kept in a society without roads, police, schools, and many of the other services that the government provides.
Competition in the Media holds much of the blame. In the 1970’s the “Birther” lies would never had been printed. Now, if the media doesn’t cover one of these spectacular lies they lose readers/viewers so they are forced to cover them. We have seen over and over again how if you repeat a lie often enough it takes on the shine of “truth”. One of the scarier media/political trends is the publishing of polls asking very complicated questions and then having a politician act on the result of the poll: “XX% of the population doesn’t like the TARP program”, While less than 1% of the population is educated and intelligent enough to understand it in the first place.
Only stupidity can explain the secrecy now involved in politics. A politician that goes against a powerful special interest group can almost be assured of a large war chest being contributed to his opposition in the next election. On the other hand the Senator that puts a secret 3 day hold on legislation that may harm a special interest, is almost assured of a large contribution as well as the secretly funded campaign against his opponent next election.
One of the current lies being repeated is that the United States is a Christian country. While the majority of Americans claim to be Christian, we have never been a “Christian” country. Many of our founding fathers professed a religion closer to Unitarian Universalists than Christianity. There have been Jews active in the country since the 1700’s and Thomas Jefferson actually translated the Koran. The “Special Nature” of the US is largely because of its’ tolerance, not its’ religiosity. It seems very weird that the very people who are fighting Sharia in the US are the same ones who want the government to force prayer in schools, have the government decide when life begins, and fund religious programs.
Intelligence is a relative thing. We consider someone “smart” if they are smarter than we are. We are frequently challenged around those that are smarter than us as they make us feel stupid. This has made us rail against the “elites” and be more accepting of the “not so smart”. I would suggest that society is too complex for simple answers, instead requiring those with the intelligence, experience and knowledge to solve today’s problems. This is not to suggest that “experts” don’t have their own agendas, but only to state that we need listen to the experts with knowledge of their agendas. In any case we have to stop accepting and call out the stupidity that keeps coming our way.
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