A couple of nights ago I saw a Mercedes commercial discussing the future of self-driving cars. It was a pretty neat thing with a dad having a learning moment with his daughter using a video screen while the car drove down the freeway.
I turned to my wife and said 'In our lifetime we'll see self-driving cars'.
Then I got to thinking.
"How do we know that the two people in the car were a dad and his daughter?"
I mean, the country is currently undergoing a massive re-evaluation of what is, and what is not, acceptable on the marriage, gender identification front. And while it seems ridiculous to say that a societal return to authorized pedophilia would ever happen (remember, pre-teen girls marrying older men was quite common, even in Western culture, not all that long ago) is it silly to think that we might return to those days?
The point is that things move fast. Sure, the groundwork for the sexual and political transformation (calling it a revolution is a disservice to actual revolutions) that America is undergoing has been being laid for years, in colleges, in public schools, if history is being written by the victors then future history is going to have a decidedly progressive slant.
The thing is, there's no "wrong side of history" but there is a "losing side of history" and that's the side that you don't want to be on. We're going to have to come to grips with the idea, for now, that conservatives are most certainly on the losing side and there's very little that can be done about it in the short term.
For the highest elected office in the so-called "beacon of freedom" for the world we're going to be faced with a choice between a corrupt, paranoid egotistical woman with no redeeming moral quality, or a complete and utter berk who happens to be a self-promoter with a childish set of debate skills. If we have a choice at all. Because, at this point, The Bronzed Ego appears to have decided to mail it in against The Anointed One giving legs to all of those "stealth Democratic operative" conspiracy theories.
A bigger problem is the increased tendency of every level of government (regardless of party affiliation) to try and throw the US Constitution into a very large paper shredder. From the 1st Amendment to the 10th, and through all of the V articles, the only thing that politicians seem to take interest in are the items that provide them with more power.
Because of this, the 9th Amendment is pretty cool to Progressives because it allows them to create so-called "rights" which they then use as a cudgel to limit the actual freedoms that their political opponents pretend to enjoy. For Republicans, relegated to joke status and limited to controlling the States, the 10th Amendment is a fave-rave because it lets them file lawsuits and call for a gang of idiots to meet in a doomed-upon-announcement Article V convention of the States.
The idea behind the convention? To further amend the US Constitution putting more power in their hands.
We have a media that's dropped all pretense of neutrality, and which is actively arguing for the rights of other people to be curtailed. We've even gone to calling for the detention of political dissenters on a variety of issues.
It's an old cliché but true, the United States, the so-called freest country in the world, has the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration (excluding N. Korea, for whom we have no reliable data) in it by far. You're only free in America if you choose to toe the line. Step off the line, even for a second, and an army of paramilitary shock-troops come busting down your door to slap the nonconformity out of you.
Amazingly now, in Texas which bills itself as the reddest of red states, they don't even have to follow proper due process to use evidence against you.
We have cities that are devolving into de-facto war zones where more people are dying on a weekend than Omar Mateen killed at Pulse. Yet no one is saying anything about it because it's "just a bunch of minorities killing minorities" and we've somehow decided that that's OK, as long as progressives are running things and making sure that it's their patronage system in place.
We don't debate anymore in America, we snarl, snarkily of course. It's gotten so bad that some in societies lowest-common-denominator (the US Senate, for those of you new to this blog) publicly stated that Republicans wanted to "sell guns to ISIS" because they didn't want to pass a so-called gun control bill that would strip around a Million people of due-process rights. Then those same water-carriers voted against a compromise bill because.....election season.
In a just world those politicians would be paraded in the public square, laughed at, and faced a barrage of rotting vegetables being hurled their way. This before being booted from office (if not recalled for sheer stupidity) and their names forever enshrined as a synonym for stupid.
Instead, they're being praised for making "sick burns" of the other side and the best observers can do is shake their head and talk about just how prescient the fairly pedestrian movie Idiocracy really was.
It's not that we should yearn for a return to so-called "greatness" or that going back to the bygone days of old would be ideal. But isn't it OK to yearn for a return of competency and that we move forward in an intelligent manner?
As a conservative, I tire of political figures (and gadflys) trying to put on Ronald Reagan's ideological underwear and parade around in a false fug of nostalgia, just like I tire of progressives trying to solve the current financial mess by clamoring for a return to a 1960's economy.
There are great ideas out there, the so-called "gig" economy, self-driving cars, telephones that have more computing power inside them than the entire NASA moon mission, but we waste all of that focusing on trains, bikes, footpaths, selfies and 140 character pieces of mediocre snark.
We've chosen to view government as an ATM machine and then we're appalled when politicians (saying 'greedy politicians' is a redundancy) use it to dole out cash to their friends, supporters and ideological fellow-travelers. We call for better leadership but cast our votes for two of the worst leaders in the modern era.
In short, we keep doing what we've always done, just more so and more loudly, and expect to wake up in the morning to a different America.
Because of this I've come to the conclusion that we are all insane.
Which, when you really think about it, explains quite a bit.
