flynn23 wrote:
So where is the corollary? Where is that great leader with vision and fortitude and resolve? Cuz I can't imagine things much more fucked up than they are now.

Be careful what you wish for. You'll have him, but things aren't near fucked up enough yet. Frankly, this has only directly impacted a very small percentage of American lives. People who work in the NYC finance industry. People who work around the Pentagon. Some people whose family members are in the Army, but if your son is infantry you know what that means, and there is honor in it.

People, in general, have been paying way more attention than they were a few years ago, and it took a lot longer for things to shake out in the Northeast than in other regions. But, most of us have continued to live our lives, and the attention has manifested itself primarily as heighted partisanship. Partisanship is about feeling rather than thinking. It means you're allowing someone else to think for you, because of how you feel, and they have vested interests. Its a different state than apathy, but its not the crisis state. The crisis state is where people really start thinking for themselves. Where they refuse to be partisan and really start focusing on the facts because the facts are matters of survival.

At least, thats the good way. There is an alternative. The alternative is where people are afraid to think. They want other people to do the thinking for them not because they aren't really serious enough to do it themselves but because they can't bare the responsibility of it. They need to follow someone else. Thats a far more dangerous direction. I pray it doesn't happen here, but it can. Only time will tell, but things are inevitably going to get worse and not better. We're in a bad part of the cycle of human society. You and I are young enough that we'll see the other side of it, but we'll be old men when we do.

RE: The Vanishing