How Long Do Republicans Wait?
Americans who vote Republican have to remember that, for people who work for the Republican Party, it's just a job. They may like their jobs. Mostly they prefer to keep their jobs. They may share the Republican sentiment for free-market principles and military readiness; but when someone like me comes along and suggests that Republicans petition for a nation of their own, they worry about things like job-redundancy and relocations more than they do about Democrat big-government and peacenik sell-out.
Republican Party tele-marketers hit the phones everyday as a matter of routine—securing pledges from reliable contributors and pitching candidates to voters before elections. On days off, they like to go boating or picnicking, attend ball-games, and make dinner-dates. They have little sense of an independent philosophical orientation—like most people.
Most people, political or apolitical, trust a lot in the rule of reason to keep real-life free of insanities like war and other man-made disasters. They obviously haven't glanced at Facebook in a long time.
Most people I know no longer bother with it. When I pressed them, they said the angry tone used by the other posters, and the insults that went back and forth, scared them away.
FB has come a long way since its origins as a quasi dating-service. Now people use it as a tool to vent their raw hate for the other side. FB doesn't bother to bleep out four-letter words any more. It might as well try to hold back the ocean.
Some of the bloggers want the government to go after the wealthy to pay more taxes; other bloggers want to dismantle the capitalist system altogether; and replace it with what? None of the bloggers offer any clues about that; but the more you challenge private ownership, the more you tease people into questioning the basic right-wrong issues that undergird our civiliation. With those basic issues out of the way, none of us will be safe. To talk about people starving in our obese nation is just rank demonizing.
But life goes on in the Republican Party as it always has, promoting its candidates, cheering them on, in the face of a scheming opposition, leading to a more divided electorate than ever before. You really have to ask "What's the point?" If the elections only reveal a hostile and divided electorate, what can elections really accomplish except a Pyrrhic Victory? America cannot maintain its vitality and stability in such an environment. The lack of discussion among Republicans to gain relief for our embattled country perplexes me—maybe because only one solution remains, to divide the country.
YouTube has reposted the 1980s movie, The Day After, starring Jason Robards, John Lithgow, and Amy Madigan. It describes a real-enough war-scenario from the '80s, before Mikail Gorbatschow came to power in the Soviet Union—involving both East and West Germany. The area of conflict widens and accelerates, and involves both NATO forces and the Soviet Union. Someone pushes the nuke-button, and a flotilla of missiles bombards America.
The movie impressed me mostly because it shows the real America—where distracted reactions of average Bourgeois Americans leaves them vulnerable to a catastrophe. The Americans simply don't want to acknowledge the extreme danger and amend their usual routine. They wait until it's too late to save themselves. The movie shows how people react when the looming nuclear war interrupts an average wedding-rehearsal party or a college football game. A Saturday shopping run turns into a mad race to gather in groceries before the nukes arrive. The public remains in denial until the last minute.