Independence Day In 2024

The purpose of the Society’s Building Blocks blog is “Critically Thinking About Things That Change Society” and it’s been a rather depressing task in the 21st century to witness all the absurdities coming to the forefront of our society that are destroying our culture and the core foundations of our country.

Independence Day in 2024 should be another year where we gather together to celebrate the birth of our nation and the foundations that bind us together, but something seems different this year. It’s become nothing more than a paid holiday so people can party while the core foundations that have supported our society and culture for nearly 250 years are crumbling under the catastrophic weight of cultish tribal partisanship that morally bankrupt activists are actively promoting. Everything that makes the United States what it is is being intentionally undermined. That undermining has caused an underlying dread of things to come because in just a few short months “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” will exercise our civic duty and vote for the next President of the United States, many of the members of the United States Senate, and the entire United States House of Representatives. The problem is that if we the people are to believe all the fear mongering campaign rhetoric and disinformation (Disinformation: is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country) propaganda we’re exposed to then all the candidates on all the ballots are evil incarnate.

Fear mongering has become all the rage in 21^st century USA politics, it’s a political, societal, and cultural train wreck waiting to happen. The extremists are promoting an “age of rage”, as Jonathan Turley calls it in his book titled “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage“, and it is in our face in full force. We have a faction of our society that is using the ends justifies the means mentality to “get Trump” no matter what stone they have to overturn or what it does to the country, Alan Dershowitz describes it his book “Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law“. Moderates, centrists, and independents are being completely ignored, smeared and persecuted because extremists have taken over the two major political parties and anyone that disagrees with the extremists are considered evil and worthy of persecution. So the result of all this rage filled extremism is that you either join the extremists against what they see as evil or you get tarred as equivalent to the evil.

The fear mongering put forth by the rage filled extremists has become so main-stream and “acceptable” that it’s negatively infecting moderates, centrists, and independents and sucking them into falling into the same kinds of extremist rhetoric that are bottomless rabbit holes. The Orwellian styled absurdities we’re confronted with make the absurdities in Alice in Wonderland look rather tame. It’s easy to identify this infection when self-proclaimed moderates start meandering away from the middle and choose to mouth the same kinds of disinformation propaganda as the extremists do instead of relying on critical thinking, common sense, actual facts and the truth. Truth is literally under attack in USA politics, society and in our culture from morally bankrupt activists that cherry pick statements and turn them into bald-faced lies that are spread to unsuspecting sheeple that swallow them whole because they want to be fed their opinions instead of doing their due diligence to find the real truth. I’ve provided examples of the absurd moral bankruptcy that I’ve observed in previous posts, they exist all over the USA in news media outlets, bloggers, pundits, influencers, online commenters, etc where people immorally take something and extrapolate it to absurdity to gin up as much faux outrage as possible.

Where politics, society and culture is concerned, fear is a hammer and we’re nails.

How can we counter these trends?

Recently I was introduced to an organization that is trying to actively counter current political and social trends, it’s called The Wisconsin Alliance for Civic Trust. The organization is very intentionally bi-partisan in that it has appointed a Democrat Co-Lead and a Republican Co-Lead as the Senior Advisors of the organization. These Senior Advisors work together to promote bi-partisan membership and promote their principles across the entire political spectrum. Their principles which are as follows:

1. Trust and honesty in politics.
2. Peaceful engagement.
3. Fair, safe, secure elections.
4. Civic education, civil discourse.
5. Cross-partisan collaboration.

Let’s face it, most of us fall somewhere in the political middle and lean a bit left or right, some lean a lot more than others, but as I have observed over the years we all have common ground.

We share many commonalities, many common goals, and many common values and those should be the foundations that we build upon to bridge these ideological chasm walls we’re facing in the 21^st century.

We want trust and honesty in our politics but we’ve seen, especially in the recent 21^st century that we cannot trust what’s being told to us when it comes to most anything political. Most of us actually want peaceful engagement but when we offer this kind of engagement the extremes attack us. I honestly think we all want fair, safe, secure elections the problem is we differ, sometimes very stringently, on how what’s happened in recent past and how we find common ground on fixing the issues. Civic education is paramount to the future of the United States so that we don’t have a majority of ignorant people presenting false arguments because they are literally ignorant. Civil discourse is a great thing but it doesn’t mean that we the people give into that which would undermine our culture, society, or country; it also doesn’t mean that when we disagree that we’re being uncivil. In the end our politics must have some kind of cross-partisan collaboration to get things accomplished, we need to strive for that instead of the divisional pompous asses climbing on their high horses to score political points.

What’s completely obvious to those of us that think critically, is that if we want trust and honesty in politics; peaceful engagement; fair, safe, secure elections; civic education, civil discourse; and cross-partisan collaboration then damnit we have to do the things that promote those things and set the example. If we want truth in politics then we need to promote the truth by educating those that do not share the truth and share the truth ourselves. If we want to be a leader and promote American values that we hold in high regard then damnit we need to stand up and do it and be a beacon of light for others to follow. We can do these things but we also need to try our best not to fall back on old familiar ways that veer away from those principles and openly recognize the times we fail.

Let’s face it, we the people and the United States are not perfect and never will be, but we can certainly strive for a better tomorrow for ourselves, our fellow Americans, and nation as a whole.

Remember that…

Unfortunately at this time in our history; based on observed cultural, societal and political patterns in the 21^st century, I see the 2024 election as being a societal and cultural disaster for the United States of America. No matter who is elected, the reactions are going to be bad, and they’re likely to be very bad.