Well, the day has come! Are you nervous? Are you looking forward to it finally being over, or like me, feeling anxious about what cometh?
For me, likely on some “enemies list”, well, I’ll be catching a plane into the Mexican Sierra Madres early in the morning and as I joke with my Trump supporting friends and family, I’ll be taking with me my old rusty Red Rider and a can of shot.
Could be that I’m just going on a vacation but I’m a bit relieved that I am. To parody the Woody Alan joke, “I’m not afraid democracy will die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens!”
My two simplistic takes on why this has all come to be:
- Declining support for Horace Mann. It is possible you are not aware who that is, but almost a century ago he was the cutting edge that sliced open and exposed the need for public education if self-government was to survive. He argued that it must be non-sectarian, embrace children of various backgrounds, taught using the tenets of a free society, that stability depends on a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals.
Public education has been under successful attack for decades, with civics education rendered almost non-existent resulting in the first measurable declines in civic knowledge and history, even as it must be clear to the most challenged amongst us that after thousands of years of bumbling, our country brought a democracy anchored in public awareness that exploded human freedom, knowledge and advancements throughout the globe making us and much of the world the brain blowing success that we are.
Discussion of public education, where we once led the world and now lead the decline has been non-existent for decades.
- Entertainment: It has come to mind recently that politics may be the last forum to be overtaken by our culture’s desire for instant gratification, some other new worldly enchantment that gives a quick intoxicant of satisfaction.
So very many politicians, over the years have been manipulative, twisted truth, hollow promised this and that never to bees, that it bores the now cynical masses.
Along comes the jester, who magnifies the manipulations, lies and promises to such an entertaining, dreamy, cartoonist level that it imprisons the attention of every media news outlet and in turn each citizen, “What the Hell” many think, “He’s different!”
Anyway, I can be found crouching amongst the boulders high in the Siera Madras with my trusty Red Rider thinking of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and a couple of World Wars when America survived much worse.
Richard Kimball
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