I've never liked putting people into boxes: liberals, conservatives, gay, straight, religious or not, etc. Most of us, regardless of our 'box' have a lot more similarities than differences. When you travel and interact with different people, you especially see this.
From all the substack writers and commentors I read and engage with, I get the impression we all want to have our basic human rights respected. This includes various freedoms that have been denied to us over the last few years, a peacefull existance, some semblance of fair play, a legal system and health care that work to a reasonable extent.
I've always voted, even when I didn't like my choices. Like you, I've probably, and at times certainly have, been somewhat gullible and naive. But I think there's more to it than 'just naive us'. At mid-60, I think we in the west grew up in a political system that we could to some extent trust at least to the point that it was not completely evil. Our political systems today are trending in the direction of evil, justified by certain expected end goals. A lot of our fellow citizens don't see that just yet, thus the trust in government/health/pharma bureaucracy.
What astonishes me over and over is how frequently we get these dreadful exposes of monstrous things our government in partnership with academia has done--regardless of which party is in power--and yet all the bright caring intellectuals, or ambitious lawyers, etc. etc., keep sending their kids to Harvard or Johns Hopkins etc. etc. etc. because what's a little torture, in the scheme of things? And that word *torture* covers such a range of activities it's just an amazingly capacious concept.
The population of Good Germans is just crowding out every other life form, it seems.
And this behavior is everywhere. Every single organized religious group has its sex abuse scandals. Nobody ever wants to really clean up their own cesspools. There's always this fantasy that, well, at least, say, the Buddhists don't do that! [Insert pet group as appropriate.]
By my own choice I lived overseas at various times over the course of my adulthood, and eventually I learned that it was better to live in America, regardless of all our flaws and failures, than to live anywhere else. I was fortunate to have already left NY when the Plague Era hit and to therefore have had only some performative nonsense (that I too supported in the beginning) inflicted on me. This has been a very educational era. But still not enough people have learned the correct lessons from it. We got a lot of work ahead of us.
I've never liked putting people into boxes: liberals, conservatives, gay, straight, religious or not, etc. Most of us, regardless of our 'box' have a lot more similarities than differences. When you travel and interact with different people, you especially see this.
From all the substack writers and commentors I read and engage with, I get the impression we all want to have our basic human rights respected. This includes various freedoms that have been denied to us over the last few years, a peacefull existance, some semblance of fair play, a legal system and health care that work to a reasonable extent.
I've always voted, even when I didn't like my choices. Like you, I've probably, and at times certainly have, been somewhat gullible and naive. But I think there's more to it than 'just naive us'. At mid-60, I think we in the west grew up in a political system that we could to some extent trust at least to the point that it was not completely evil. Our political systems today are trending in the direction of evil, justified by certain expected end goals. A lot of our fellow citizens don't see that just yet, thus the trust in government/health/pharma bureaucracy.
What astonishes me over and over is how frequently we get these dreadful exposes of monstrous things our government in partnership with academia has done--regardless of which party is in power--and yet all the bright caring intellectuals, or ambitious lawyers, etc. etc., keep sending their kids to Harvard or Johns Hopkins etc. etc. etc. because what's a little torture, in the scheme of things? And that word *torture* covers such a range of activities it's just an amazingly capacious concept.
The population of Good Germans is just crowding out every other life form, it seems.
And this behavior is everywhere. Every single organized religious group has its sex abuse scandals. Nobody ever wants to really clean up their own cesspools. There's always this fantasy that, well, at least, say, the Buddhists don't do that! [Insert pet group as appropriate.]
By my own choice I lived overseas at various times over the course of my adulthood, and eventually I learned that it was better to live in America, regardless of all our flaws and failures, than to live anywhere else. I was fortunate to have already left NY when the Plague Era hit and to therefore have had only some performative nonsense (that I too supported in the beginning) inflicted on me. This has been a very educational era. But still not enough people have learned the correct lessons from it. We got a lot of work ahead of us.