Many credible explanations have been presented concerning the etiology of the present dystopic state of our Republican Democracy. One cogent proposition is the irresponsible and inadequately justified decision by the Supreme Court in the Taxpayer’s Union case, eliminating limitations on corporate political contributions. The latter, ruling, significantly aggravated the threat to democracy already posed by the eternally undemocratic influence of money. Other attributed causes, social and political, have been proposed as empirically causative. However, Insufficient attention has been paid to populist apathy and detachment from matters of relevant principle in favor of those offering reductively perceived as specifically relevant in their mundane experience or those promising superficial diversion.
Our hierarchy of precipitant causes of the presenting, pathology suffered by our body politic is predominated by the uninformed, lassisitude of many self-indulgent citizens more concerned with matter so ethereal as an athelete crossing a designated white line and scoring a “touchdown” or the successful drive of a hockey puck or a soccor ball into a net. The most profound deliberation by much of our population, disappointingly, is that expended in the purchase of an automobile.
The late, brilliantly lyrical holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel, on an analogous subject, said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” The mainstream American citizen has empirically and painfully learned that the most formidable threat to our Democratic Republic is not foreign espionage but National disinterest and its consequence of disaffected vulnerability. We attribute the rise of Trump and the MAGA horde to the consequential failure engendered by smug and reductive assumptions by many thoughtless American citizens of an infinity of status quo of the singular, precious liberty and democracy in America.
The thoughtless perception of invulnerability thoughtlessly eschews all consideration of possible threat, aside, conceivably, from the remote possibility of an attack against our Nation. They precariously ignore the imminence of its eternally more possible domestic vulnerability. Discussions at backyard barbeques and coffee shops are more likely on the Superbowl, the World Series, or local real estate taxes and events, to the exclusion of matters of governmental or civic import. It is revealingly and embarrassingly instructive to recall that Donald Trump received his existential public notice as a host of a widely viewed, banal television game show.
It is notably obvious that there exists no vaccine for this widely metastasized and consequential pandemic of toxic indifference. We would reprise the prescient observation of one of our esteemed founders, Thomas Jefferson, that the success of a democracy is dependant upon an informed and concerned citizenry, thus, generously supplying us with the presented theme.
We, acknowledge the existence of several principal causes, of the present political dilemma, viz., money in politics, the moral decline of SCOTUS, the presence of an unhealthily large population of populist, underbelly and eternally aggrevied citizens, vulnerable to demagogic snake oil promises of retribution against society, the pathological polluting corporations interested in profits and disinterested in human health and the presence of adverse foreign inflence. However, it is our principal view that, bizarrely, little or nothing has been relevantly observed regarding the quality of our citizenry, the combustible raw material existential to the present conflagration.
-p.
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