Who To Blame?

All hopped up on God and Twitter, the Red Hats have plopped themselves down on the capitol steps to... uh, I'm not sure what exactly they hope to accomplish.

I get that the longer businesses are shut down, the more money the majority of us bleed. I get that people want to go back to work. I even get that subsistence hunters could argue that ammunition is a necessity. What I don't get is that this is a numbers game, and that the greater the number of people with the virus, the longer the shutdown is going to last. Mass protest is just going to result in more cases, and more cases is going to result in more economic damage, let alone the fact that it also is going to result in more deaths. It's pretty monstrous to talk about the deaths as a sad necessity, but one somehow less important than the ailing economy. Our inequities have never been more obvious, and to see the Red Hats stomping around in front of capitol buildings and blaming it all on the democrats is laughable. Blaming it on the power elite I can see, but looking at this along party lines is ridiculous.

Our ability to think for ourselves doesn't seem to be much in evidence here. Our ability to emotionally react to sound bytes and Twitter triggers, however, seems to be very much intact.

My own daughter once mentioned that I tend to use my rational mind to the exclusion of my emotional one. I think she thinks my answers to questions are unremittingly logical. This is often true. I would rather be too logical than too emotional though, especially when there is much at stake. My one goal as a teacher has always been to guide students toward thinking for themselves, because I see a great lack of this ability in our society. Look at the photos of the recent protests (no, I'm not going to link them here) and ask yourself: have these people really thought this through, or are they just desperate and angry and need someone to blame? They'll probably find somebody to blame when a number of them come down with Covid-19, and it will almost certainly the democrats. Never themselves. They've learned that lesson from the great gas ball in the White House. Deflect, deflect, deflect.