How much more can we take?
On the holiday weekend of July the 4th, the United States of America witnessed body cam footage of Akron, Ohio police firing sixty some odd shots into a young unarmed black man and then 24 hours later in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, a very well armed young white maniac let loose a hail of bullets into a crowd of parade goers, killing seven.
So much violence.
In what has become the stubbornly typical response to violent tragedy in this country, our elected officials and their political water bearers offered the usual chorus of thoughts and prayers, quickly followed by meaningless fancy speeches and prime time nightly news interviews. Including what might be the front runner for this year’s Tone Deaf on Twitter award…
Yes, the senior writer/editor for HuffPost Ann Brenoff, went with the ever popular “Just Vote Harder” response to national tragedy.
This has become the Democratic Party’s favorite go to response to any and all major maladies currently affecting the population. Most often followed by the ubiquitous, “Please Donate!” emails. Crime and police brutality tearing your community apart? Vote Blue. Supreme Court rips your rights away from you? Vote Even More Blue. Bankrupted by our for profit health care system? Please Donate to help re-elect Nancy Pelosi to her 500th term in Congress.
Conversely, on the Republican side of things, before the wounded had even made it to the hospital they were already dusting off the old, “It must be Antifa!” line of defense. Because as we know, everything and anything that remotely challenges their fragile “Make America Great Again” world view has to be a George Soros funded, crisis actor casting call. Cunningly orchestrated from the basement of Planned Parenthood by the vile Clinton Foundation puppet masters who are out to take all your guns and force your kids to attend RuPaul’s Drag Race Day Care Center.
This is the ugly reality of how U.S. politics today responds to tragedy under the duopoly of the Democrat and Republican parties. So should we be surprised or shocked that according to recent Gallup poll…
“Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any.
From the Police, to the Supreme Court, to Congress, across the board U.S. citizens are losing faith in our vital institutions in record numbers. Notably, the biggest drops in citizen confidence from last year to this year were found in the institutions of the Presidency and the U.S. Supreme Court. They both fell 15 and 11 percent, respectively. This doesn’t come as a surprise given how feckless the Biden Administration has been when faced with the major political, economical, and social challenges we’ve seen over the last year. Rising inflation, Roe v. Wade, Climate Change… just vote harder.
Gallup goes on to point out that…
This year's poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government -- the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress. Five other institutions are at their lowest points in at least three decades of measurement, including the church or organized religion (31%), newspapers (16%), the criminal justice system (14%), big business (14%) and the police.
This nose dive cuts across all party lines as well. With the Gallup pollsters noting that from Democrats, Republicans to Independents…
All partisan groups are generally less confident in the 16 U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with average declines of four points among Republicans, five points among Democrats and six points among independents.
Even more alarming is how institutions that are usually immune to the cynicism of the day, for better or worse, are also seeing their confidence numbers drop. Reason.com points out that…
“Even institutions that most Americans continue to trust, like small businesses (68 percent) and the military (64 percent), saw slight declines in this year's poll.”
How much farther can we fall or maybe the better question is what happens to a populace that loses all faith in its institutions? The answer to that maybe found in a recent polling data collected by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which discovered that a majority of American’s believe their government is corrupt and rigged against them. Pigging backing on that, the data also revealed that…
“…more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their government that they believe it may “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it,”
One in four Americans.
That’s a truly frightening statistic. That should make anyone’s blood run cold after reading it. Violent revolution is not the answer. Any student of history will tell you that a political revolution based on violence hardly ever brings actual freedom to a country. More often than not, it replaces a bad government with a totalitarian one. This is how dictators are born. Why do you think the CIA has spent so much of its dark history instigating and fermenting violence in countries whose leaders do not play ball with U.S. foreign policy?
These numbers should be a wake up call to the Democrat and Republican parties and our elected representatives as a whole. From the city, state, and federal level our leaders and those running for office should pause and take a long deep look in the mirror and ask themselves, “What can I do to bring us back from the brink?”. Honestly, we should also be asking that same question of ourselves as well.
Remember, despite all of its failures, the United States is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. The people means our friends, our neighbors and ourselves. Do we really want to take up arms against our neighbors because they don’t agree with us politically or because Donald Trump or some other narcissist like him lost an election? That doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to corruption or forgive leaders who put the needs of a privileged rich few over the needs of many. Bad leadership should be held accountable, but not over the barrel of gun. You see, despite what Hollywood and historic nostalgia try to sell us, violence is not sexy, cool, or the answer to corruption and failed government. Voting is.
No, I’m not asking you to vote harder. I’m asking you to vote smarter.
Thank you! Violent revolution is generally called for by folks who have no conception of what that would actually look like or what would result from it. Vote smarter, not harder is great advice. Better yet, encourage good people to run, or run yourself if you’re good people. Get involved locally. Get to know the people who are running for office.
Also I love this description, “Because as we know, everything and anything that remotely challenges their fragile “Make America Great Again” world view has to be a George Soros funded, crisis actor casting call. Cunningly orchestrated from the basement of Planned Parenthood by the vile Clinton Foundation puppet masters who are out to take all your guns and force your kids to attend RuPaul’s Drag Race Day Care Center.”
What's the point of voting when members of Congress sit in their seats for decades doing nothing but sucking bribes out of a corrupt corporate power structure?