It’s Super Tuesday, March 1st and I stand in New York watching teletype and news media while wondering about the maturity of the United States electorate. I’m completely baffled as to how so many people could propel any of the current crop of candidates to office.
To answer my conundrum, we need to only look unto ourselves. The mirror need not go anywhere else, as our current electoral candidates only reflect our internal state of affairs. And for the moment, that reflection looks pretty awful.
The anger oozing from our candidates’ ooze from within our very breath. Each of us has become a honeycomb of hatred and vile. Dialogue and symmetry for the common good is assassinated by legalism, conservatism, liberalism or one issue voting.
The absurdity of Black Lives Matter and University of Missouri protesters reflect our incapability of common dialogue. Opportunities to move critical racial issues were tossed like yesterday’s news, managing to become only a mere byline on a newspaper’s forgotten page. I wonder what positive contribution could have been made without the screaming and violence. Yet Ferguson, Baltimore and New York fretted golden synergistic opportunities for civil disobedience moving little, if anything, forward.
Both GOP and Democratic candidates have issues.
The GOP has carved a difficult path forward. In the aftermath of raw hatred, degrading Muslims, Mexican’s, blacks, while calling other candidates liars, losers, has-beens and unheroic are ‘en vogue.’ A leading GOP candidate has labelled women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” How they move forward is a vision from its past.
On the Democratic side, one leading candidate proposed free education, healthcare overhaul and cutting prison population by 50% after the first four years. It’s ludicrous.
If we look at just the prison population issue, Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson tweeted Sanders’ promise raised a serious question:
“Is it even possible, considering that the vast majority of the nation’s inmates are held in state, not federal, prisons?“
Only 215,000 of the 2,000,000 million inmates are in federal prisons. The rest are in state and local facilities. So even if we abolished federal prisons altogether, the United States would still have more prisoners than any other country.
Many claim current “social action” processes proposed purportedly intend to benefit mankind. Yet, much of the current election cycle is based upon the notion that complex or critical thinking isn’t required. In fact, both of those are highly discouraged. At its core, the political message is fairly simple: grab a Bible; go to church once per week; hang a U.S. flag; buy a gun; and repeat the talking points being fed.
America’s issues are real and require hard choices. Real “social action” requires a range from simple individual acts of charity, teaching and training, organized kinds of service, “Right Livelihood” in and outside the helping professions, and through various kinds of community development as well as to political activity in working for a better society.
Instead, we’ve become cheerleaders for intolerance.