A close friend said to me, “Our country (United States) is not only divided it’s broken.”
He’s right.
There is an equilibrium–a balance–evident in everything that sustains life.
When the equilibrium is violated or “broken,” life wanes as its vitality is diminished.
If the violations continue unabated, life ends.
That applies to all living phenomena.
It also applies to the phenomenon of what we call “politics” which loosely means the way we live our lives.
Humanity breaks out into a normal distribution of left and right, i.e., progressive and conservative.
It’s referred to as a bell curve or a “normal” distribution.”
The normal distribution just barely sustains humanity which is still in a primitive stage of evolution.
Civilization and “civilized life” are very fragile.
Below a thin veneer of order lurks chaos ready to spring.
Mess with the normal distribution, “break” it, and you have what we have today: a broken country.
There are two huge problems:
1. The Republicans have managed through gerrymandering to destroy the fragile political equilibrium. People who consider themselves to be in “safe (gerrymandered) seats” do whatever they want however extreme and foolish. They can get away with being radically ideological. It may sustain their seats in government, but it will not sustain a country or a species.
2. We do not have equal representation in this country. The progressives, who are superior numerically, are concentrated on the coasts for one thing. The other problem is that sparsely populated states have two senators, the same as heavily populated states. The result is that representation (including the “Supreme” Court) is not representative of the majority of the people. The least educated, a minority in the populace, have undue, ominous, and debilitating influence. We have minority rule.
Informed people know all about these issues and more.
It’s very dfficult to change this catastrophic equation within the existing framework.
While this disastrous scenario continues, the so-called “conservatives” (who are anything but conservative) protect the financially elite while serious, life-threatening, species-threatening problems escalate.
Something has got to give. It’s inevitable.
Most likely, crises will escalate.
Crisis, not science, is the most consistent wake-up call to which humanity responds.
Will the wake-up call come before the scale of the mix of crises becomes insurmountable?
One would think, at this time, we have had sufficient wake-up calls. Yet, they are ignored.
That is a formula for disaster, which is the price of ignorance.
Just as ignorance-induced disasters happen at the individual level, they happen at the collective (species) level.
How can they not?
Collective consequences are the aggregate of individual behaviors, good and bad.
Ignorance, a frightening force, is a juggernaut (a massive inexorable force that crushes whatever is in its path) not overcome easily.
It must be overcome if we are going to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
This is humanity’s challenge.