The American Experiment is failing as our rugged individualism and perverse attraction to idiosyncratic political ideologies has kept us from uniting as a true nation. The country is more highly divisive, bitter, and even acrimonious than at any time before in its 245-year history except for the Civil War where 620,000 thousand, at least, were killed before we could put the country upon a broader paradigm with more equal rights in praxis.
What is wrong with U.S. besides having broken memes, ideologies, and a political paradigm that are transforming our national politicians into incompetent royal-like figureheads, like King George III, especially, by the mid-21st century?
Can we have an effective compromise between our two parties, Republicans and Democrats, as President Barack Obama had hoped, even though they have acted more like rambunctious elephants, and stubborn donkeys?
'Yes, We are Talking About You!!'
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In this post-truth era, we recklessly (almost) never engage in a truthful and factual debate sans a plethora of fallacies in logic: Argument ad hominem, circuitous reasoning, begging the question, false analogies, etc. This state of affairs is so depressingly abject that most high school debate teams have more substantive and honest debates than what we have seen between political opponents and parties on television - and the public, more like bawdy Romans - perversely enjoy this and are satiated by bread and circuses in the Coliseum.
However, if we step back away from the televised shouting, and entrenchment, we can see The Rules of Political Engagement and Sophistry that most political participants now engage in. What are they? They are: 1) Never agree with your opponent even if they make perfect sense; 2) Spin whatever is happening towards your political advantage; and if you resemble Joseph McCarthy or a past European dictator, so much the better; 3) Politically label the opposition or event in the news so that you gain the upper hand even if it involves 15 or 33 innocent school students being mowed down by gunfire; 4) Engage in identity politics (and crass emotionalism) with your constituents, as you cleverly evade the rational mind and press the reptilian button in the human brain, so that our political conversation deteriorates and a mob mindset dictates things even further; and 5) Stoke fear, hostility, and anger so that eventually the talking heads on television can manipulate the masses by simply flashing signs (or memes) so that the herd that is humanity, reliably moves this way or that way in red or blue states.
Is this really where we want to go, exploring how to manipulate the minds and the consciousness of the American public through television and a multimedia, multi-pronged attack?
Obviously, the general public should not participate in these effervescent melodramatic shows that abjectly pass for a political debate these days. We should draw the line of demarcation during these perilous times, and demand more from our primrose politicians. If this does not happen now, we definitely will in twenty to thirty years, when there are nine billion on this planet, and hundreds of millions, who lack food, water, shelter and education, and hope, begin to migrate across borders. Or worse, yet, we have water and oil wars, or even a nuclear one.
These are my seven proposals to bring the political conversation to a higher plane:
Demand that we begin to look at the scientific facts and mathematics of the various crises besetting us for the next fifty years from global warming to pandemics to non-arable land to destruction of most ecosystems to population explosion, etc. - and at the same time, both this American nation and the global community should efficaciously problem-solve these things in a viable manner.
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