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In the wake of Mitch McConnell's mid-term victory, my high school sweetheart (a psychiatric nurse practitioner) sent this lament: "Just got back from the polls to hear Mitch say how he would represent all the people of Kentucky including "the mother whose family lost their health insurance" WHAT??? All these people voting against their own best interest and the best interest of others! I can't stand it."There was a time when I too marveled at America's passion for self-destruction.
In the last decade however I have come to understand that most people -- particularly "conservatives" -- prefer "purity of principle" to "self-preservation."
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
More Merton Quotes
The following articles were unusually helpful to "getting a handle" on America's devotion to counter-productivity and self destruction.
"Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism
http://paxonbothhouses.
"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"
"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"
Increasingly, American "conservatives" realize that the unstoppable drift of socio-politics is toward liberalism.
Rather than submit to the pending demise of rugged individualism and "exceptional values," Ted Cruz took the stage last night to express conservatism's determination to return to the 19th century: “Give me a horse, a gun and an open plain and we can conquer the world,” Source: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/wayne-slater/20141105-at-texas-gops-celebration-next-campaign-already-underway.ece
Despite the allure of "a home where the buffalo roam and the skies are not cloudy all day," a horse, a gun and "conservative principles" are incapable of guiding a techno-scientific society.
Paralleling the growth of scientifically predicated socio-economics (the life blood of Capitalism) America's view of religion is ever less dependent on "miraculous intervention" and ever more dependent on predictable principles that can be consciously guided to achievable ends.
To most American Christians this view smacks of self-apotheosis.
To most Americans this view represents an end to superstition and abject prostration before a Thunder Sky God.
To most American Christians this view smacks of self-apotheosis.
To most Americans this view represents an end to superstition and abject prostration before a Thunder Sky God.
"Pope Francis Links"
The only alternative to America's liberal future is Anarchic Apocalypticism - which, reinforced by an oddly secularized theocracy - aspires to destroy the American political process, a system of governance that has trended toward scientific liberalism ever since The Founders set sight on The Enlightenment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
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"Faith, Hope, Charity And Divine Desperation"
Deism And Founding Father Links
"Bank On It: The South Is Always Wrong"
http://paxonbothhouses.
George McGovern: "The Case For Liberalism, A Defense Of The Future Against The Past"
George McGovern: "The Case For Liberalism, A Defense Of The Future Against The Past"
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