The Pain

This election hurts more than the last. This time there are no excuses: no popular vote, no hanging chads, no Ralph Nader, no voter apathy. This time the American public stood up and made themselves heard. I believe what they said was, "We are a bunch of ignorant, terrified, fools who deserve what we will get for the next 4 years." Unfortunately the other 49% of us are going to get it as well.

What bothers me the most is the disconnection from reality. I don't think it's ever been this bad. One of the realities of a society like ours is that culturally the majority of people would rather be presented with and accept (even in the face of overwhelming evidence) a comfortable fabrication, than deal with the difficult realities which face us. This is what the neocons have hit upon. Give people a simple way of understanding the world. Tell them that it comes down to good and evil and they are good.

It doesn't matter what the truth is anymore. The public are so willing to swallow what is comforting and simple that they don't care that it is completely false. We're winning the war in Iraq. Our schools are getting better. The economy is improving. They eat it up, because they don't want to acknowledge that the world might not be perfect and safe.

In a sense it's parrallel to religious fundamentalism. Christian (not to mention Muslim and Jewish) fundamentalists point the finger at the unimportant things: homosexuality, drinking, sex, language; in a vain effort to distract themselves (and perhaps God) from the real sins of pride, hypocracy, and selfishness. I hope hell exists so that the self righteous bastards of the religious right can arrive there with cries of, "But I wasn't gay." Not that I'm bitter. It's ironic as well that the religious fundamentalists in this country are the ones who are most likely to critique Islam as fundamentalist and freedom threatening. Are they completely blind to the fact that they are the American Taliban?

Yes they are. They and 51% of the country are willfully blind to anything that challenges their world view and their comfort.

Perhaps we were guilty of the same thing. We took comfort in the fact that the American public could not possibly be so stupid and blind as to vote for Bush. We can see clearly now, and what we see is terrifying.

s.