The Great Unraveling

Meditating on the political landscape, I can't help but feel that we are witnessing a great unraveling of American society.

 Reason has gone by the wayside. There is no moderation; every lie is attacked with a greater lie, and every liar adamantly refuses to admit they are lying. There is no middle ground; those who wish to occupy it are reviled by both the left and the right.

My own life is an example. Raised by staunchly Republican parents, I grew up with the understanding that you don't spend money you don't have; that you don't poke your noses into other people's private lives; and that you compassionately support others as best you are able. My parents—let me stress it again, firmly Republican and conservative—have insisted lifelong on the utmost respect and compassion for women, homosexuals, and minorities. Generally speaking, their conception of life is to see other people as human beings—not enemies.

 Does that sound anything like the Republicans we know today? Probably not. Essentially, I still espouse these values. I'm not in favor of big government—I work in two industries (importation and medical products) which are consistently hampered by onerous regulations our Federal bureaucracy forces on them.

 On the other hand, I'm a child of the 60s and 70s. (cue the Elvis Costello song, What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?)   I think we should help poor people.  I think very rich people should pay, on all their income, at least as much in taxes, percentage-wise, as I do—not less than half my payroll tax rate. I think government-sponsored entitlement programs are reasonable, as long as they are competently managed. (Our political class seems pathologically incapable of competent management of anything, although all of them are elected to do just that.)

 In essence, it turns out I am a moderate. I have a blended set of views that espouse both conservative and liberal principles. Yet when I point inconsistencies in their positions out to my conservative friends, they angrily accuse me of being a liberal—usually accompanying these accusations with personally denigrating remarks, indicating that I am some lower form of life. They routinely send me crude e-mails—which they think are funny—arrogantly asserting blatant untruths, announcing patently absurd conspiracy theories, and aggressively advocating non-Christian thinking and non-Christian principles. They claim that global warming is a scam, but not one of them has ever read any actual articles by scientists about the subject. (The fact that most Americans appear to think they can understand science without actually studying science is a bizarre, yet objective, fact. If we did the same thing with electricity, most of us would die while doing routine household repairs.)

 My liberal friends are a little better, but not much. They, too, look at me sadly as though I was some kind of dirt-sucking slug when I point out that not every liberal position makes sense. They are universally opposed, for example, to every kind of practical energy production, even though all of them drive cars, use computers, and have air conditioning. When I try to explain to them how incredibly complex and expensive it is to put in and manage energy infrastructure, they insist on pretending that an imaginary world of solar and wind power is just around the corner for all of us—and, of course, that there is a conspiracy afoot in the energy industry to prevent this (yes, Liberals have their very own lunatic conspiracy theories, just like Conservatives.)  They all want to eat boutique foods grown organically on local farms, as though everyone in the world had such luxuries available to them if they only wanted to do it that way. They oppose every genetically modified organism that comes along, even if, as in the case of cotton, the modification allows a drastic reduction in the use of pesticides—obviously a significant benefit.

All of the problems we have in front of us will take decades to correct, but we have equipped ourselves with a media—and a social attitude—that insists everything should be fixed right now, or, if not, in no more than five minutes. Five minutes or less, by my estimation, because that constitutes the attention span of the average American.

 The collapse of a civil dialogue about these issues, and the collapse of any real effort to educate ourselves to understand how complex our problems are, signal the collapse of American society in general. Extremists on both sides are leading us towards a schism that will result in violence. It won't be a little bit of violence—there will be a lot of violence. One can't ratchet tension up to the levels we are seeing now—thanks to a national media that specializes in inducing either coma or inflammation, but nothing in between—without something breaking.

Our society, which was founded on ideas of tolerance and reason (that, at least, was was what the founding fathers professed belief in, although few Americans—including some of the founding fathers themselves—actually embraced those ideas, beginning with slavery and the extermination of Native Americans) can't survive this wave of intolerance and unreason. It's a tsunami sweeping through our social systems, our government, and our economy, and it will ultimately destroy everything in its path if we don't bring both the dialogue and the system of government back to middle ground.

  Vast sums of money are being spent to elect government officials, but no one is spending money to elect people educated enough to understand the value of compromise.

One can be smart in every other area, and stupid in this one place, and cause all things to fail.

 Looking around us in this election year, one might easily be excused from concluding that, if this is the best we have, we will fail. We don't have leadership—we have chaos and accusation.

These are not desirable qualities in a nation whose population is armed to the teeth with guns, and breeding an underclass of radicals who are already convinced they will have to use them.

 When will we see a national movement to take back not the right, or the left, but the middle?