This is largely about my wife.
You know her as The Blonde. Anything I say about her in this post should be taken with the knowledge that I'm the first to say she is a very smart woman. Smarter than me, certainly. She knows so much about medicine, she made a career out of setting doctors straight. She is an incredible diagnostician and has an encyclopedic knowledge of drugs and how they interact.
She is also a fighter, which is very much a two-sided sword. She also has a big heart. Most of our mail is from charities, many to save animals. She's no bunny-hugger, but actually reveres all life. She has some real problems with abortion.
However,
she grew up in a parochial enclave of NE OH that thinks it's the All-American Town, extremely insular. She attended public school there and, in senior year, had the mandatory course, Problems of Democracy. What the curriculum was, I can't say, but she didn't know much about the basics of how the country works beyond the basics of the Constitution.
And that led to the fight.
She kept saying how Trump lost and that was the end. I brought up how the election was stolen and, because of that, it can still be challenged. She asks how could the courts allow it. I asked didn't they ever teach anything about how machine politics work, about crooked courts.
No, they didn't.
She's also very sketchy about history (no inkling of the Weimar republic, f'rinstance) and I end up asking myself how do they not teach history. Even math seems to have been considered expendable after arithmetic. Even though she struggled with algebra in school (the teacher was no help), she got the concept on her own, as she showed me when, asked to help with her pharmacology homework, she pretty well already understood it.
Of course, we all know how public education, as it exists today, is intended to produce drones. Thing is, she knows things are looking bad. She knows enough, without understanding how printed money works these days (as I say, she's a smart woman), that we can't spend $5T without inflation. She hates the lockdown. She hates the entire clown car in DC.
If she's at all typical, Shi and the rest of the crowd, here and in the Forbidden City are in for a fight.
And you don't want to get her mad.
5 comments:
I feel your pain Ed.
You are a history buff like me so you have some perspective.
I conduct a history class every morning at breakfast when we discuss the news.
Keep fighting the good fight.
It's hard to get through to people, and this is especially true of highly intelligent and competent people. They are the kings and queens of their own worlds, and rightfully so, but their intelligence and competence in their own worlds makes them value their opinions highly even on stuff they don't know as much about. Our government has gotten so complex that you need expertise to understand and interpret it now. In a just world we'd all have Ph.D.'s in Deep State Bullshit Studies. A lot of this info comes as a complete surprise to people who don't pay close attention and just jump to conclusions based on lived experience and media static.
If your wife thinks US judges are honest haver her read about Alcee Hastings
Both am and am give good advice.
Troop, You have a greater resistance to battle fatigue than I, but, as Beni said to Rick O'Connell, "Your strength gives me strength" .
IN mid-20th century Germany, millions of Jews peacefully walked themselves into death camps all the way imagining that what was about to happen to them was just too absurd to be a reasonable thought, let alone a reality. No doubt there were some who waved a red flag and said we must fight this, but were told "that's crazy talk. That could never happen."
There were a long line of previous warnings and opportunities to prevent the horror that their faith in humanity told them was just paranoia. If history tells us anything, it's that humans are perfectly capable of unlimited abuse of their fellow man. Ask yourself how could people succeed in doing truely horrific things to millions without being stopped? The only real way for that to happen is if you can convince them that it's not happening until it's too late. If people lie to you, you are foolish to ever trust them. The second chance you give them may be your last.
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