Ah, would that my attitudes were just generalizations. Thanks to everyone who commented and I won't forget the caveats and defenses of the good life around our country. But after half a century of activism, including early skirmishes with hyperconservative Young Republicans in Wisconsin and a continuing ringside seat in our national politics, I don't believe it's snarky to remind the Daily Kos readership that we are in an era when Fox News agitprop is taken as gospel by millions of our fellow citizens and systemic Koch-inspired and financed activities are running rampart with a vocabulary of generalizations that are effectively destroying democracy in state after state in these United States.
This is a national crisis without doubt IMHO and I wonder just how willing armed enforcers will be to test the traditional Chinese notion that one may not successfully rule at the point of a gun.
Another case in point is that of Governor Walker who would strip hundreds of millions of dollars from my home state's post-secondary educational resources and send other such large amounts to the benefit of already swollen private accounts in professional sports.
One doesn't discover new intellectual horizons with such an attitude and one certainly does edge ever closer to public expressions of brutality reminiscent of the bloody era of deadly gladiatorial conflict in the history of failed empires.
The current contretemps over actions by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States demeans the Office and constitutional responsibilities of our President. This is happening while the Speaker of the House of Representatives cranks out a 56th futile attempt to undo accomplishments in health care financing, an effort at the national level that has resonated with presidential reasoning for more than a century. The social demoracies in Europe are much to be admired by way of contrast to conservative intransigence in our own country.
The absurd attacks on preventative vaccinations stand out as truly wooden-headed resistance to well-established medical orthodoxy. Just how far are we to travel down this path to national pandemics before state-level intransigence is called to the electoral carpet? How damaging shall these episodes have to be before the vox populi reject those who would fiddle while our own Rome burns?
I agree with Scott Walker on one point - think big. If fossil fuel obsessions are fouling the North American continent, that's everyone's problem, whatever our love affair with internal combustion engines. Gerrymandering is seriously distorting the representative character of our national legislature. Tinkering with voting eligibility is another deliberate national attempt to control elections at every level of government and it will take a national effort to quell such organized machinations.
There are plenty of such generalities that hold water - what's sad is the complacency of middle America that can't be bothered to get involved. It doesn't make any difference where I personally live or might choose to travel, but what I think and why and how I deal with my thoughts the way I do does matter. I'm no Stiglitz or Warren, but there are lots of kindred spirits that serve as serious mentors in my thinking and what with the Internet, there's no need to hole up in a Northwoods cabin either personally or conceptually.