I See You Quoting Mencken Again
Today’s black coffee and ginger snaps thoughts:
Mencken might seem cynically wise at times like these, but overall he sneered at democracy and the common man, he disliked our institutions intensely, and he’s become the modern patron saint of those wild west libertarians who think every bit of government and all of our institutions are evil when they are clearly not.
As a country we might get things horribly wrong at times, and both wingnut and moonbat fringes like to tear things down and magnify the exceptions to make you hate our laws, our mechanisms for government, and our way of life. Don’t let them do that because we’ve had 240 years of steady improvement together and most generations do better than those preceding. Let’s not give that up for fear, for partisanship, for our team winning over theirs.
It’s a political game of inches and sometimes we step a few feet back and it seems that all is lost. Don’t despair, over time we do muddle together in a giant scrum towards the good but we are only able to do that because of our laws, our institutions, and our shared faith in our democratic republic. Don’t tear it down over the outcome of an election, pitch in and help fix it.
Don’t listen to those cries and bays in the night that all is lost, that we need to destroy everything to make it better. Because that’s a total lie, a big lie, a lie from voices inimical to our institutions, our ideals, and our form of government. They don’t care about left or right, they label themselves what it takes to accomplish their destructive ends, and they will troll and concern troll from either end of the spectrum as it serves them.
They don’t care about the future, they only want destruction. Like Al Qaeda they want an anarchy, a wilderness because that’s when fear takes over, when might makes right, and tribes go medieval. They encourage despair, paranoia, and conspiracy because that’s where they find recruits, and they know that’s the only atmosphere where their evil ideologies will be tolerated.
A final thought as I dip this last ginger snap — a majority of your country men did not vote for Trump, most of your country voted for Hillary - that’s not a knock against Democracy at all.