Ignorance is rampant and it's not getting better

Politics

Where we are heading as a nation is something that gravely concerns me and that I think we all would be wise to take some time to consider, if not for our own sakes, for those of future generations. Clearly willful ignorance is rampant and proudly being embraced. The election of Barack Obama and the health care bill have only revealed it, but they aren't where it began.

Ignorance and being easily led are not just going to impact what we do about the growing health care problem but also the environment, education and pretty much anything we attempt to do as a united people. It's almost as though ignorance has become a virtue. Whoever tries to confront it is attacked with insults or worse.

For a certain segment of our population, facts are tossed aside if they didn't come from a Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. I suspect though that if Beck or Limbaugh changed what they are saying, this group would turn on them also. Media pundits like Sean Hannity are no longer, if they ever were, the masters of what is happening.

Too many people are not considering their own best interests where it comes to health care reform and are easily stirred into a frenzy by words like socialism (which has become a metaphor for evil). Do the ones who respond to that fear even know what socialism is? They sure didn't appear to understand what fascism was as they have embraced its early stages for the last 8 years.

From where did this ignorance come and what can those of us, who do stay informed and do think (from either political party), do about it? Here's one article offering a possible source of this thinking, but it really is not that simple to blame a few key leaders. The people who follow after these ideas are hearing what they want to hear. They often twist it to suit themselves. They glory in their ignorance and yet they are possibly beginning to set agendas.

Revenge of the Paultards

Ron Paul seems like a basically decent man, but what he said about the Federal government does not actually fit the Constitution. He's intelligent. He has to know that. The people hearing these ideas may not. The ones saying the federal government has no business being involved in health care (despite many of them benefiting from its involvement), do they know what is actually in the Constitution?

Paul followers claim that the Constitution only allows federal government to be involved in wars and commerce. Regulating insurance rates [which have gone from 1.5% of GDP (1970) to now 5.5% (2007)] could come under that category, right? They are wrong though that the Constitution doesn't cover more than commerce and wars. Senator McCain was booed in Phoenix when he said Obama understood the Constitution. How many of those booing did?

Since I recently reread the Constitution (thanks to a question by Paul from Shadow of Diogenes), I saw something else in the original document which makes a government concern for public health care a legitimate issue.

The first is in the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In section 8 there also is this:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

What are general welfare and domestic tranquility? The tea partiers, no taxes for anything, and no federal benefits at all, apparently would eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and any federal welfare programs. Don't those things come under the category of general welfare or tranquility? I don't know how they would fund the wars they have often favored which the most recent ones haven't done anything for our general welfare or tranquility.

Those, who see the Constitution as an immutable truth that cannot be changed or should not be, ignore that at the time of the Constitution, women had no vote, freed blacks could only have partial votes and there was still slavery and indentured servitude. The Constitution is being used by a group of people as though they know what it says. Like so much else, they don't.

Photos taken by Farm Boss the last week of August when we had our grandchildren here for a farm week. That night we had gone out to dinner at a place called Gathering Together Farm. It sells produce but now does have a seasonally operated restaurant. It was a delightful evening with our daughter-in-law (her idea), son, their two sons and our other two grandchildren. The lush, colorful flower garden inspired me to enlarge a fenced space to have a larger one of my own next summer.