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Real people suffer
My Facebook posting today.
Usually, not always, I shy away from mentioning politics on Facebook. Please tune out, if you prefer. Over on Fox, which is generally the friendly chat platform for politicians who use the pro-life slogan, they’re starting to talk about ending the social distancing very soon, and as they say, likely letting elders die as a result, in order to protect American wealth. (I don’t actually see why the plan would work, by the way.)
I don’t understand why a “pro-life”-chanting national political party could stomach this line of thought, but that national party is almost always uncritically in favor of, for example, our country’s military actions overseas, so the pro-life slogan is hard to take seriously when spoken by that party’s leaders.
Few of the party leaders support a military draft, crudely taking advantage of the military service tradition in lots of American families while avoiding the wide, democratic public discussion that possible declarations of war cause when the whole country is at risk of being called to serve.
That’s a crass manipulation on their part, but no more crass than the party’s well-known perfection of gerrymandering to avoid thinking overly much about the opinions of voters. These politicians do a very fine job of making government look a bit like a democracy while paying less and less attention to what that should mean.
Here in Indiana, for example, my US House member almost never visits places where she would run into Democratic voters. Some but not all of these weaknesses, failings, and manipulations are shared by both national parties.
Anyway, the national Republican Party uses the words “pro-life” as part of a morally incoherent grab-bag of tricks and tools whose focus is power. Nor will most of these leaders criticize the President when he opines hatefully to his rallies or when he doesn’t bother to get the basic facts straight when discussing a deadly international crisis on TV. For reason after reason, when the national Republican Party remains in power real people suffer and die.
Well, if you have read this far, thank you for doing so. I am not going to argue about any of this here—doing so feels unhealthy for us all. If you’d like to argue, please do NOT do so here or in private messages—everyone can read your political thoughts on your own Facebook stream. Thank you.
End of Facebook posting.
PS. Don’t get me started on the national Democratic Party…