When I was a young person there was a great deal of discussion about how children arrived at the ability to process logical thought at about the age of seven. It was called the age of reason because supposedly at or about that age, children could understand a simple logical progression.
I am therefore astounded that for some reason our country is currently populated by an amazing number of people to whom, logical thought is anathema. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems to me that a huge number of people in this country act and vote against their own best interests. I don’t understand why that is. I can understand people differing on complicated issues that are framed in different shades of grey or where issues are not clear cut or where their parameters are not defined or results of their solutions not obvious but I’m not speaking of these kinds of situations.
I am speaking about situations that are completely clear and obvious, and that except for misinformation, that is often disseminated by those who actually stand to gain from the misinterpretation of the facts, should be obvious to even the least perceptive of our citizens.
Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about:
For the sixty years that followed the great depression, the banks and businesses of our country were made to conform to certain regulations, the aim of which was to keep them from committing the same mistakes and taking the same risks that had led to that depression. Recently various administrations have loosened those regulations and the banks and big businesses, in their consummate greed have again caused the nation’s economy to fail. Despite this obvious cause and effect, many of the nations voters, and I’m speaking here about the ones who don’t own banks and oil companies, are still against government regulation of business. Now I understand that everyone thinks that they will someday participate in the American Dream and they don’t want anyone telling them what to do when they get rich, but the facts are really stacked against that and the more they support the too rich, in their constant striving for MORE, the further the average guy gets from his dream.
We are engaged in a war in Afghanistan that along with the criminal invasion of Iraq is helping drive our country into bankruptcy and is not by any current definition of the word winnable. We have no stated goals for staying there. Al Qaeda is all but gone from that country. It has no significant oil or mineral capability, no national structure and the people have no desire for democracy, which they do not understand nor have any background to facilitate. It is a feudal, tribal almost fourth world country, where we do not belong and from which we have nothing to gain. Why are we still there, throwing away lives and money that are both desperately needed here? Why don’t we get out…immediately? Our continued presence and the resulting unavoidable civilian casualties only make us more enemies every day. We are actually creating a generation of potential terrorists by staying there. There is no logical reason for us to be there. And yet our president speaks of plans that run past 2014. It’s ridiculous.
Our current healthcare bill is by no means perfect. It contains so many plus factors, like expanded coverage, lowering of deficit reducing Medicare costs, preventing coverage cancelation, etc. that it is far better than any current alternative. Despite this the Right has condemned it, and mostly with lies and misinformation, has influenced a significant number of those who are in a position to personally benefit from it, to help them campaign against it. If the Right’s goal had not been so clearly stated, there would, at least, be an excuse for those who might benefit from the new health care law to see it in a negative light, but Republican leaders like Boehner, Gingrich, McCollough, Cornyn, Sessions and a few others have been quite outspoken about killing everything that Obama has created no matter how much it hurts the country and the people in it.
Now come two very tough ones.
As I’ve stated before I am a gun owner and was formerly a federally licensed dealer in weapons and explosive devices. Despite this I can see no logic other than greed, which drives the NRA and our country’s weapons manufacturers and sellers, to oppose the sale of assault weapons and large capacity magazines for semi-automatic and automatic pistols. I heard Mike Murphy on the tube the other night use the argument that if a person drives his car into a crowd and kills a dozen people we do not hear a hue and cry to ban Chryslers. Talk about specious logic. I thought even Mike, slow a he is, could come up with a better argument than that. No we don’t try to ban Chryslers because the basic job of a Chrysler is transportation and only because of misuse did it end up as a weapon of destruction. Assault weapons, however, have only one basic function, the taking of life and don’t start blabbering about the second amendment. The founding fathers had no idea what an automatic weapon was or what it could do. If they had, they might have adjusted their thinking on that one.
There have been over 30,000 killings in Mexico in the last couple of years, due mostly to interaction in the local drug wars. This is absurd. We haven’t lost that many soldiers in two wars in 10 years. That violence has spilled over the borders into the US. Right now it is much more threatening to the health and success of our country than all the Al Qaeda threats and all the oil business in the Middle East. Our foreign policy must be changed to reflect this but so must our drug policy. “Just say no.” is the motto of a fool. We all know drugs are bad but so is booze and gambling and they are both legal in this country. Both are controlled to some extent, but both are legal, as is prostitution in some areas. I do not use drugs, even legal ones and I am not an advocate for drugs but one has to be a fool not to see that the only realistic way to deal with the evils of the drug problem is to legalize drugs and then control them.
By the way, the evils of the drug problem are not addiction. Addiction is a personal problem, a disease or a weakness; whichever floats your boat. The evils of the drug problem are murder and the uses to which the billions of dollars that occur from the sale of illegal drugs are put. The money made from the sale of drugs is so unbelievably huge that it corrupts our governments and our police, it pays for terrorism, it creates illegal governments in weak countries throughout the world and it results in death and destruction on the scale of a major war. It is illogical and immoral to allow this carnage to continue just to mollify the same idiots that thought prohibition was a good idea.