Summer Park County Fair Moon
Nice. Phillip Castile. Dallas. And that’s just the last couple of weeks.
Russ Douthat, a NYT conservative columnist, and a co-author have an article in today’s paper about curing Trumpism. It identifies a core problem in the Republican party. The party has, for several decades now, been a party of two parts: the establishment elite and working class whites. Trump has limned that division and created an internal revolution between these two very different constituencies.
“Some of these concerns (of the white working class) are rooted in racial anxiety, and an older generation’s inevitable fear of change. But many of them are rooted in basic human vulnerability — a very personal exposure to stagnant wages, family breakdown, military quagmires (America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America) and a social crisis of opioid abuse and suicide that hardly anyone in Washington or New York noticed until recently.” Douthat, NYT, 7/15/2016
Brexit. Greece. Refugees and immigrants. The impossible dilemma that the bloody marriage of oil and Islam has bequeathed on the world. And that’s just Europe and the Middle East. Consider, too, the rise of China and the recent decision of the UN panel against China’s claims about the South China Sea. Of course there is, too, the region of the Great Game, that mysterious hidden world (to the West) of the ‘stans, armed conflict going back hundreds of years.
People who feel history no longer listens to their voice become dangerous. Most people do not want power or great wealth or globe spanning influence, most people want food for themselves and their families, a roof, water, gainful work and some time to enjoy life. In each of the trouble areas of the world whole groups, classes of people, cry out. They are not fed, clothed, housed, watered, working. And joy is difficult to find. Imagine the family gathered for a meager meal, the kids running around as children do. As grandparents, you look at the children and see their future. Bleak.
Think of China, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, México. Whole populations want to matter, feel as if current history has promise, yet are uncertain of its arrival. The world is a dynamic place, shifting and changing always. Even the great civilizations like Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, Persia rose and fell. Our times are not different in kind, only in the details.
Politics is the way humans sort out their communal conflicts. U.S. politics are in a fundamental reordering right now, but the primary point, here, as elsewhere on mother earth, is to treat each other well. When we don’t, murders and wars and the collapse of nations can follow.