Sailing to Oblivion: June 4, 2017

Fear and loathing is a catchy phrase for a book title, but no way to run a country. As Hunter S. Thompson said, though, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” We bought the ticket, and now we are riding into oblivion in a country ruled by fear and loathing. What irony.

Reading the news today, I can’t help believing that the major policy determinant emerging from the current American presidency is the desire to eradicate the memory of President Barack Obama in the manner of Egyptian kings defacing the statues of their predecessors.

No matter how sound, or popular the existing policy may be, the goal will be, not to amend it, not to replace it with a sounder tool, not to ignore it, not to admit, however grudgingly, the efficacy of a rival’s work, but simply to end it. “I’ll show him,” sounds better as comic book dialogue than as political policy.

There are even plans to renew the nearly 60-year-old cold war with a Cuban president who isn’t even still alive. This poses economic damage, with no benefit whatsoever to the average American, to our farmers and many businesses, not to mention simple humanity.

Then there are the plans to renew the long-failed attempt to eradicate drug problems through incarceration. Of course, this plan has another element in addition to pure spite. The idea seems to have germinated from the mind of a man who has substantial investments in private prisons.

The idiocy of this policy becomes more evident when one considers that voters, even in a conservative state such as mine, are increasingly voting to legalize the use of marijuana. And too, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to name more than a few people one knows who have never used drugs in any form. As the movie character said, “I’ve been to college.”

In the news, I read yesterday that a sizable section of our population is composed of Americans who “don’t believe in the scientific facts of global climate change.” Believe? Science is not something in which someone believes or doesn’t believe. Goodness gracious. Jump from a tall building and see if the Law of Gravity cares whether you believe in it or not.

When the last tree on earth is cut, as the last tree on Easter Island was, nature won’t care if we don’t believe in the scientific fact of photosynthesis, not even if we declare loudly that we believed in individual property rights more than we believed in survival.

When we start bringing back the iron lungs for children with polio, the disease won’t care that we claimed a right not to believe in the healing power of scientific facts.

When Trump Tower is under water up to its second floor, the Atlantic Ocean won’t care that an American president didn’t believe in climate change.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Ain't that the truth?