Doomnation

In timing that can only be considered ironic, the latest report from Copenhagen is released. As the rest of the world is recognizing the existential implications of climate change and mankind's primary role in it, we in the US are about to turn congress over to people who'll make sure we continue to ignore it. Deny it. Pretend it's a liberal plot.

It's unbelievable and inexplicable that our nation has turned so steadfastly to such people; has become unwilling to make the sort of sacrifices, address the challenges for which it once was rightly known. It's depressing beyond description that a small cadre of very wealthy people whose livelihood depends on continued pollution have so easily subverted our political process, bought our elections, bombarded people with evidently irresistible propaganda, feeding their fears and relying on their weakness to achieve their ends.

And now, finally, we see the results of the so-called Republican "long game" and the inability of feckless and disorganized Democrats to match it with reality. Brilliant: single out the religious base, convince them Christianity is under attack, vote them into school boards, endumb the populace, feed fears of bogeymen that don't exist. Behind the power of a unified disinformation network, get them, and then those around them, to believe we're at greater risk from those that would provide health care and public education than from those who'd rape the land and darken the skies for profit, who figure there's nothing that will result that can't be dealt with in their insulated castles, so who cares.

Is that hyperbole? Am I over the top? In prose, maybe. But in fact?

If humanity survives long enough, history will look at early twenty-first century America and smack its forehead so loudly it'll be heard on the moon colony which if it doesn't exist means humanity is a thing of the past.

The fault will be ours, America's only. Exceptionalism will, finally, be inarguable. We'll have been the only country on the planet that buried its collective heads in the hot sands, from which the words will barely be discernible but will still be mumbled, plaintively: voter fraud, IRS, ebola, ISIS, Benghazi, birth certificate, socialism...

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