As the American people look at our nation today, we are aghast at what has transpired over the last couple of decades. We see a country where the people are split into angry factions on almost every subject, factions that will neither acknowledge the legitimacy of the other side’s claims nor the possibility of their positions.
We exist in a world today where every accepted staple of life has surrendered its credibility and is now actively chasing either the almighty buck or some absurd political position to the detriment of that which made it an anchor of our former way of life.
America has never been politically astute. We have always been a nation that was easily led by pundits with a good spiel or free beer, but the world has changed, and the world of today has provided opportunity for the ingestion of information that never existed before. The problem, along with the increase in the ability to learn, has become the temptation to absorb false facts. This has happened at a time when our political factions have been allowed to lose the fear of falsehoods. That’s right, for a couple of centuries it was fear that kept politicians somewhat in line with the truth. Politicians always exaggerated, always told little white lies, but they were always careful never to get caught in the big one because that would cause the public to revolt against them and that would lead to the end of the power train.
Then, along came a thing called Donald Trump, a lifelong con man and small-time crook who rode his ability to lie with a straight face and a “prove me wrong” attitude, along with an authoritative personality developed on a popular TV show, into a Presidency he had no ability to fulfill. Trump showed the world that the proper combination of physical presence, along with the ability to lie about anything with a straight face, mostly because he had no recognition of the truth, only of what he wanted to gain by any statement, worked. This was at least in part because the public discovered that there were things, they wanted more than they wanted an honest man in the White House. Things for themselves, things they thought they were entitled to, regardless of whether they were willing to work for them or not.
And just as Trump won an election on a series of lies and a full course helping of bullshit, it became evident to others that they could accomplish something themselves, and it would be easier for them, because they were looking at smaller goals. And so, we had the instant tidal wave of small-time crooks, phonies, con-men, and outright psychopaths that inundated the halls of congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, George Santos, Lauren Boebart, Steve Scalise, Nancy Mace, Jim Jordan, and of course Speaker Johnson himself, along with a dozen more, are infecting the processes of our government and crippling its ability to function as they spread their self-serving poison to destroy the ability of the people’s government to do for the people what our founding fathers meant it to do when they created it.
*****
London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, was on This Week last Sunday talking about the problems of the city she governs and how those same problems are infecting every big city in the nation. And she’s right. The problems of all the big cities are at the very least, similar. Crime, poverty, homelessness, education, drugs, and the multiple diseases of urban living are all around us. But assuming they are signs of modern governmental failure is in fact a failure to understand what causes them, and that they have always been with us.
The perfect example is NYC, which in its Golden Age, the 1890’s, was also a cesspool of urban crime, and poverty. It just depended on what neighborhood you were in. The same was true of the city in the 1970’s when wealth soared while drugs, crime and homelessness raged out of control.
The problem seems to have always been a lack of governmental judgement coupled with the fact that problems are attacked without regard to how solutions will affect other situations around them. When NYC tried to mitigate the effects of an obviously unfair bail law, they overdid the solution egregiously, letting career criminals loose time and again to ravage the population.
The same problems have developed with homelessness as, time and again, the city’s zoning laws have stood in the way of creating more affordable housing, while the out of control, Department of Buildings has seen fit to try to protect the health and safety of the population by creating and enforcing a series of new laws that have made it all but impossible for landlords to keep up, and still remain legal.
What the cities need are lawmakers who have the intelligence to anticipate the future and address potential problems, otherwise well-meaning laws will create chaos for other areas of the local structure. Passing a law to help a problem in housing that creates a problem in safety is not an improvement, it’s just a waste of time and energy.
*****
I want to say something about the roots of the Hamas attack on Israel, knowing full well that any statement about anything as divisive as that attack will be misconstrued by at least half the people in the world and lied about by the other half. But here goes anyhow.
It is a situation rife with hatred and misunderstanding with a history of violence and double dealing that is pretty much unrivaled in the history of the world.
Clear thinkers that approach the situation without prejudice, appear to agree that a “two state” solution is the only way to go, but there are strong forces that refuse to accept anything like it. Why? Well, general agreement on the western side points to a Palestinian position that refuses “two state” in favor of waiting for some occurrence that will end the Israeli presence by some other, as yet to be determined, solution. The Palestinians will deny this, but the history of the negotiations tells us that they have passed on the “two state” every time it has been proposed.
Was the Hamas attack the catalyst the Palestinians had been waiting for? If it was it seems to have blown up in their collective faces.
What the Palestinians have achieved by dragging out negotiations and never accepting “two state” has allowed the Israelis to violate the terms of possession of the West Bank by moving in settlers, taking Palestinian land and thereby creating world-wide sympathy for the Palestinians. This sympathy would have been even greater if the Hamas attack had been against military targets and had not been carried out with such savage fervor. As it is there is still a great deal of support for the Palestinian cause and a ground swell of support to stop the fighting, which at this point favors Hamas. This support seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the fact that it is Hamas that is keeping emergency food and medical care from reaching those Palestinians trapped in Gaza, and that many of those trapped have chosen to stay simply because they are more afraid of Hamas than they are of the IDF.
Everyone associated with the situation understood that the Hamas attack was inevitable, and there is every chance that such knowledge is exactly what drove the Palestinian refusal to consider “two state” but what no one expected was the inhuman brutality of the Hamas savages and the war they waged against women and children. In the end that may be what sinks the Muslim ship, but it will take a hell of a lot of communication and information distribution for those facts to ever be assimilated by the anti-Israel disaspora.
[]’as declared that “depraved” America deserves God’s wrath.
The incessant encroachment and theft of Palestinian land and homes had to erupt sooner or later. I remain a fan of Israel but a foe of the Likud Party and Netinyahu.
Arlen