End Of America: Partisanship

It's not the end of the world, but rather the likely end of the United States which we're likely facing these days.  

 I am not blameless - none of us in this country is.  And we have a few external threats, as well.  The true irony here is that a Department of Defense project may end up being a proximate cause in the end of these United States.  I'd laugh if it wasn't true.

Yeah, I know, the DARPA team at DOD had no way of envisioning the current social networking as arising from their quest to speed information transfer.  Who could have?  Hindsight is as always at least 20/20, the saying goes, but a deeper look makes it pretty darned clear.  And the Pandemic, occurring in the midst of an incredibly divisive Presidential Administration, was both easy to see why, and even more clear in the external threats to the basic construction of our form of government.

So yeah, I see it that way.  Not that I'm going to convince anyone to shut down the internet, but the bottom line, at least for me, is that I use several ad blockers, updated regularly, and I haven't seen a real ad on Facebook in about 20 years.  At least, not without shutting down the ad blockers to be certain they were working.  And they are.  Pretty damned well.  

So I suppose the solid argument may be that I'm not a target of advertising dollars.  Sure, I'm not in that heavily coveted 18-30 range, I'm not a young parent, I'm closing in on retirement, and I'm not wealthy.  Hell, most weeks, I can afford to pay my bills and buy groceries.  My entertainment spending has cut back in some ways, most of that goes to cable TV and streaming services.  I do watch a few, fortunately they're included in my cable subscription, which I have as a side benefit to my cable modem, which is now required in my work-from-home scenario.  I consume significantly less media with commercials than I did years ago, so I'm not so much exposed to that.

But the bottom line is, I believe, the fact that, for a little over 140 years, we had a relatively low-risk existence here in our "homeland" and could count on some sort of armed conflict to motivate the segment of society that needed to work out their aggressions.  The presence of media on the battle field, in battles, brings them home to the average citizen, which on the one hand does help to make our leaders more prudent in their spending of American lives, which is indeed a benefit.  The down sides, however, are the continued unrestricted availability of firearms and ammunition, allowing anyone with a hair-trigger temper to acquire a shockingly large, potent arsenal that has no reasonable existence in the hands of a civilian in the average American city.  

I don't oppose ALL firearms.  I understand there will be people who require the ability to protect themselves from others due to the nature of their business.  I don't know that the average racist woman needs an automatic weapon to protect herself from the small children of a different race who play in the yard near hers.  But then again, I don't have a devout nun's prayer that the average racist woman might die out in my lifetime, because the whole problem is we have an entire group of people who believe that racism is not only acceptable, it's right - not as in Conservative Republican Right, but correct - and the truly disturbing part is that those two things do tend to occur rather alarmingly together.  

I'm not calling every Republican a racist.  I am calling the Conservative wing of that formerly Major American political party as the best example of what not to do to attract votes and voters.

Our current government is a prime example of what can and does go wrong when we put the lunatics in power.  A small cadre of individuals who lack the training, experience, intelligence, and maturity to look for points where they may agree with those who perhaps have different ideas.  Compromise is what this country was founded upon, and is no longer one of our bedrock principles.  It is, in fact, a forbidden subject in government, these days,  Each side has to have a win to show to their constituents to keep them engaged.  Because if they fail, the Twitterverse and the various TikTok voices will drown out any reasonable individual, and promote the fringe.

How do we get back to the center?  We don't.  Not without significant change, which means we, the people, need to get back to the basics.  Because that tool, the internet, which we built to facilitate information transfer is now in the hands of people and governments who have absolutely no desire to see the United States to continue to be the world power it is/was.  Sure, that means they become more powerful, which again plays into the fears of the average idiot who screams again into their Internet-enabled mouthpiece that we've become less than we were, and we need to be made great again.  Yet the entire time that idea was espoused by the Orange Jesus as President, his actions then and since have proven that he is not capable of building, but rather of destroying, even that which he hoped to build. 

When I was a child or younger or middle-aged man, if any political party had found they benefited from some external force, some outside agency, some dirty tricks group to beat their opponent, they'd be both horrified, and work damned hard to eject that group and reject their influenced members.  Don't believe me?  Do some reading of your own, and see who was horrified by Richard Nixon.  Who was in charge when he was impeached?  

The other day I was having a discussion with a life-long friend and his family about the growing influence of ChatGPT and the other things the internet will undoubtedly give birth to in the future.  And we came to the conclusion that our education, that 20th Century thing we got, required that we learn and for many years only regurgitate facts.  Facts which are now in our hands thanks to smart phones, search engines, and massive databases.  As a kid, on the playground, it was important to be able to recite statistics about our favorite football, baseball, hockey, or basketball players.  I'm not as conversant with today's playground communication, obviously, but when those incontrovertible facts can be pulled out of thin air, the key tools we need to be giving our next generation are the ability to analyze, synthesize, and pull together pieces of information.  Sure, ChatGPT can burp out a new song, a new work of fiction, or other things that some may see as "new".  

The bottom line truth is that they are not.  Sure, I'm picking on AI which may some day pick my nursing home, but I'm still pulling for my kids.  And I'd also like to point out that, in the bottom line, what it does is analyze existing works, seek patterns and then replicate those in some fashion.  Sure, it's incredible that you've now got machinery that can do this, but is it an original work of art?  Nope. Derivative.  That's all.

And we need to become better at our analysis and decision making, because we're likely to head to our own demise.  There are enough whackjobs out there who would gleefully destroy everything America stands for - including many within - who can't stand the idea that we can support multiple things.  They hate the idea we allow freedom of religion, of the press, of multiple ideas.  We have such ideas that make their blood boil.  All because we're just trying to respect one another.  Or at least, we did.

These days, we have prospective presidents who crow the fact that they've fought to prevent subjects in a classroom.  Not because they're false knowledge, but rather because the simple facts of history make some people uncomfortable.  Thing is, when I was raised, those moments of discomfort helped to point out that hey, if it makes you uncomfortable, how do you think it made the person feel who had to endure it?  The person who was taken from their home, shackled, shipped across an ocean like cargo, not like a human being, and then sold to others simply to be an item that could produce things for them.  Yeah, slavery.  The whole idea of it makes my skin crawl.  But you know what?  It also makes me damned sure to avoid anything where it could begin to reoccur.  Why?  Not because it makes me uncomfortable - it treats a person like something less than a person.  A person is a person.  They should have the same services, opportunities, and rights that I do, until they show themselves to be unable to treat someone else as they wish to be treated.  

So yeah, criminals.  I'm not stupid.  I know crime happens regardless of race.  However, I do also know that crime can tend to be a way out, because someone who feels ignored or treated as less than someone else will react to it in many different ways.  If they find no way to be heard, then they also see themselves as marginalized, ignored, and I know when that happened to me, it made me mad.  

But if we continue to be a country of less opportunity, more greed, more willingness to accept the continued deterioration, yeah, we're doomed.  I had high hopes, but I also believed many of my fellow citizens also did.  I'm not so sure now.  I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that a sensible majority emerges, but I don't see that happening in the next 10 years or so, which may be all I've got left.  So I may end up that old idiot screaming into the wind.  Not the first, likely not the last, probably one that won't make much of a difference.  But I can sure hope.