Election season 2012 is now in full swing here in the US, promising yet another misspent preparation for choosing our national "leaders". In keeping with the tradition of the past 50 years or more, it will have have much more in common with a dysfunctional family holiday gathering than an intelligent, adult discussion with the goal of choosing our potentially great nation's course into the future.
The Right is likely to continue preaching the ideal of small, less intrusive government while making it a priority to legislatively micromanage peoples' in the name of morality. Their reason for wanting to turn the US into a third world country is financial. We're paying too much in taxes...cut those school and library budgets!
The Left, ever nostalgic for the 1960s, is busy occupying Wall Street now (because, um, some people there are bad with the goal of, um, making things less badder). They are likely to continue preaching the idea of more civil liberties for all, though the fourth amendment doesn't apply to taking your backpack or purse anywhere in public and they think having your privates (and your kids') felt up in airports is a small price to pay for the illusion of safety from terrorists. Their reason for wanting to turn the US into a third world country is because humans are bad for the environment.
All in all, we've become a nation best symbolized by two dumb prats in a Toyota Prius and a pickup truck driving side-by-side at 5 mph under the speed limit, both flipping each other the bird and making faces at each other. Meanwhile, the people who want the US to continue being a world leader who can compete with India and China are stuck in traffic behind them.
Where do we go from here? I see three possibilities:
- Continue with more of the same until we become a nation whose population is made up mostly of government bureaucrats and call centers operators working for minimum wage for tech companies overseas. But if we can come home and have a few Budweisers and 150 channels of reality TV, what the heck?
- A good old fashioned Civil War. When you look at our big dysfunctional family, it's abundantly clear that we're a country full of people who are really, REALLY sick of each other. So stop pussyfooting around and get on with it. Because the 1860s were a WHOLE lot of fun.
- Everybody grow the fuck up, start finding common ground with people who aren't just like you and start rebuilding a society that find strength in the diversity that's a fact of life and can make us the most versatile and successful country in the world.
