As usual, Charles P Pierce says it better than I or anyone else could:
... The world, at the age of 4.5 billion years, more or less, and increasingly depending on whether you're a Republican or not, has spun merrily around the sun one more time, and all of us are still here. We survive, but it's an open question whether or not we evolve.
It's not just the newly quantified stupid inherent in one half of our political system that bothers me, although knowing that an ever-increasing slice of one of our two political parties adheres to the biological principles of 1838 is worrisome. (What, for example, are they teaching their children? What will their children teach their own children? And on and on until half the country is painting in caves again.) It's that it's always been my conclusion that human evolution -- political, cultural, and social -- is tied to the impulse toward cooperation, or, in the case of our politics, the inclination toward commonwealth.
Since I opened this pop stand two years ago, and since the Mayans were wrong and it kept going after 2012 closed, I have seen the country take a startling, and alarming, turn away from what I believed was an irresistable movement and, indeed, I have seen people actively campaign against it, conflating in their fevered minds what drove the signers of the Mayflower Compact with the ambitions of the Bolsheviki, and translating the first three words of the Constitution from "We, The People," to "I Got Mine." ...There's much more in the article, well worth reading in full. And, by golly, if there were any true conservatives left, it's hard to imagine they'd disagree with most of it.
[Image source]
