The super-acceleration of consumerism and mass media since the end of World War Two has been a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we have seen an explosion of products and services that have made our lives safer, happier, and more convenient—I still think the person who finally realized we could put wheels on suitcases was a genius—and very few of us would want to return to a time without modern medical care, mind-boggling entertainment choices, online shopping, and the knowledge of humanity available through a pocket-sized device.
Those of us lucky to live in developed nations over the past eighty years have been perhaps the the most fortunate people to have ever existed, although we still each need to deal with the same problems that have plagued humanity forever: dishonesty, broken hearts, greed, addictions, pain, hate, fear, betrayal, violence, disease, and the inevitability of our deaths and the deaths of those whom we love. The weaknesses of our souls and bodies are the burdens we carry as the price of being alive, and we are reminded daily that our happiness is a short-term rental that we must enjoy to the fullest before it is snatched away.
In order to secure ourselves from the threats all around us and keep ourselves safe, we herd ourselves together, decide on codes of conduct, and create some form of governance that we hope will keep the wolves away from our doors. Although Americans are often great complainers, I believe it can be persuasively argued that our Constitutional Republic, dreamed up by a group of well educated and bewigged gentleman in Philadelphia and turned into the law of our land in 1789, has proven to be the most fair and adaptable form of governance the world has ever seen.
It is good that all voices can be heard, all opinions expressed, and every viewpoint expressed. However, the wonders of our modern age have crashed headlong into the inherent emotional malleability of our species and produced hi-tech demagoguery of a sort that threatens the very freedoms we cherish.
Given the ease of use of social media powered by immense data centers and enabled by the phone-sized movie studios/middle school lunchrooms in everyone’s pockets, raw emotion that is often devoid of logic or reason can be dumped into our national dialogue on any issue in the most deceptive and unhelpful ways imaginable. Malicious gossip and personal attacks now occupy the lives of those with too much free time and too little maturity, education, accountability, or restraint. Riding this wave of unfettered idiocy, far too many of our leaders have become followers and seem to spend their days on their own social media accounts validating the unhinged rather than soberly attending to our nation’s needs.
Going along with the demands of the loudest people in an angry mob of voters can provide short-term political and financial gain for the unscrupulous, unprincipled, and uncaring, but the consequences for both individual citizens and our nation as a whole can be devastating.
The transgender madness so assiduously cultivated and endorsed by Democrats over the past decade is an instructive case in point. Anyone who did not have a financial or political interest in cancelling biology in favor of gender-denying care could readily see that many troubled children and adolescents were being put at risk of traumatic misdiagnoses, unnecessary hormonal treatments, and catastrophically-irreversible surgical procedures. Court cases relating to these obvious consequences are now wending their way through the system, and a recent jury ruling in New York dropped a $2 million dollar judgment on a psychologist and plastic surgeon relating to a mastectomy performed on a 16-year old. Expect more lawsuits and furious backpedaling regarding this trendy bit of Woke insanity that also turned into boys invading girl’s bathrooms and sports in order to help Democrats win some votes in exchange for ruining young lives.
It was also plain to anyone who wasn’t seeking the votes of the terminally discombobulated (or angling for a gigantic hunk of government cash) that trying to run a modern industrial economy of windmills and solar panels while forcing Americans to buzz around in glorified golf carts was going to lead to unreliable and and expensive energy that would both empty the pockets of people trying to pay their escalating electric bills and consumers who would need to cover the higher production/energy costs of everything they buy. Al Gore got a Nobel Prize, the “green energy” hucksters got rich before their companies went bankrupt with our tax dollars, and the rest of us were shafted by a trendy move that looked great on a PowerPoint presentation—but failed in real life.
Need we say more about America’s dismal public schools, which responded to loud complaints about the injustice of differing levels of intelligence, motivation, and responsibility by working around the clock to guarantee that every student is now as stupid, lazy, and irresponsible as the next? Dragging everyone down rather uplifting the most able has not, of course, silenced those who complain that the failures of so many are due to entrenched bigotries that can only be erased by indoctrination that abandons the mission of education altogether.
If you want to be really discouraged about the future of our country, check out the trend lines of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests that regularly check how the educational attainment of nations stack up to one another; in the latest round, America finished 34th worldwide. I would never have imagined that wholesale ignorance could be so trendy, but this reality helps to explain why so many concerned parents are abandoning our public schools in favor of home schooling and/or private schools.
The magic of angry, uninformed clickbait combined with craven, duplicitous leadership has turned us into a country governed by the whims of the mob rather than the wisdom of our founders. Ask yourself if this is saving America—or destroying us.