By Bob Gaydos
"Because Americans are stupid," I said.
And with that harsh assessment of the intellectual capacity of my fellow countrymen and women, we generally shook our heads, finished our coffee and said, "See you next week."
For several years, I had a weekly coffee date with a friend whom I considered to be intelligent, well-informed, level-headed and tight-lipped. We talked about life, family and, mostly because of my interest, a little politics. At some point in our rambling conversation, he would inevitably ask, "Why do they do that?"
And I would inevitably reply, "Because Americans are stupid." Sometimes, I said "dumb."
Harsh. I know. Judgmental. It risks being called elitist. But I submit the last six-plus years of American politics as Exhibit A that many Americans are willfully ignorant, that they don't know about things they know they should know about or don't do things for their own benefit because they are too lazy, which also is dumb.
Participatory democracies don't do well on dumb and lazy. They wind up being ripe for exploitation by authoritarian thugs who want only to gain power and keep it for their own enrichment. They prey on the dumb and lazy, or the bigoted and misinformed, or the racist and ill-educated, or the fearful and easily manipulated.
However you choose to say it, this is where America is today: Much of our public debate and government action is driven by fears and falsehoods directed at and repeated by an aggressive, sometimes militant, minority of mostly iIl-informed white Americans who have been sold a bill of goods by power-hungry, wealthy autocrats and their gutless foot soldiers in the Republican Party. Dumb.
This minority has achieved outsized influence in large part thanks to the capitulation of a considerably larger group of Americans who have lacked the awareness or the will, or both, to participate in the democratic process through the simple step of voting.
Lazy and dumb.
It's not considered polite or politically savvy to say such things publicly, but look where that's got us - the FBI raiding the home of a former U.S. president to recover boxes of classified documents removed from the White House and elected Republican officials encouraging violence against the FBI agents who carried out their duty.
This is not new. Just look at the data. Most of the states that spend the least on education, public health and childcare are governed by Republicans. It's not a coincidence; it's a plan. Rewrite the history taught in schools, tell people that big government is their enemy and that they need to vote for local Republican candidates to preserve the freedoms that elitist, socialist Democrats want to give away - to "those people." Please donate.
Here's another dumb thing: a lot of so-called independent, think-for -themselves voters are fond of saying both parties are the same. Really? Have you been paying attention for the last ten years or so?
So as not to belabor what I realize is not an original point, I would encourage every nonaligned voter to ask every Republican candidate he or she encounters one question: is Joe Biden the legitimately elected president of the United States?
That's an easy yes or no answer. Voting for anyone who doesn't say "yes" is dumb. Failing to vote for the other person is worse. The vote is the strongest weapon Americans have against the army of ignorance. We ignore it at our peril.
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