American Elephants

Day two, and we still have no idea about the real and actual outcome of the election, and not much indication about when we will know. All sorts of accusations going around. Ignore them. There are massive attempts to cheat, there always are. Most don’t amount to much, but some are real and troublesome. This year, even the issues are unstable as well.

Climate is a big issue. Some expect the overheating of the earth to end human civilization sometime soon, if we don’t “do something”. The “do something” is exemplified by California’s demand that everyone switch to electric cars, while their forests burn uncontrolled because they can’t practice good forest management which would involve thinning the forests (allowing some logging) and clearing brush. Climate activists don’t want anybody cutting down trees, and so you get fires. There are often not any easy answers that would  please everyone.

I am a skeptic. The climate has been changing for millions of years. We have had ice ages and warm periods. The Renaissance, that great period of human flowering, took place in the most beneficent weather known to man. Ice ages carved the mountains and lakes that we currently call  National Parks. I’m not sure just what created the Sahara Desert, but there it is.  The current slight warming that we have experienced has meant more CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is plant food. The slight increase in CO2 has meant more bountiful crops, feeding a hungry world.

Human beings are a mess. A little knowledge, as they say, is a dangerous thing, and we have all those emotions to cope with, and the day to day difficulty of getting along with everyone else. Our sources of information are problematic, slanted, sometimes completely wrong, and we have to sort out what we can accept out of the flow of words and pictures, and try to make sense of them. Add in a major election, and passions erupt, cheating increases (there is always cheating). Somebody just got hauled off to the pokey for trying to vote more than once as his dead grandmother, and how many times is that repeated across the country? People vote in their city of residence, and also in their city of vacation home. And that doesn’t even count the deliberate cheating of the opposing party.

People want a more caring government which promises to give you more benefits, but the government has no money of its own. so it has to increase your taxes to pay for the benefits. Because you have less money to spend, the economy contracts, small businesses fail, and  the cycle is repeated. They envy “the rich” who don’t have to worry about such things, and want to get rid of capitalism which creates “the rich” without understanding that if they are promising to destroy capitalism, the alternative is socialism or communism, and we have had some clear examples of that with Cubans who set out in their rowboats or rafts to try to get to America which promises them nothing but the freedom to make of themselves what they can.

The right to rise, I call it. That’s what that young black kid who walked three miles every day to get to the public library where a librarian would help him with his homework did. His 3 miles a day got him acceptance at 22 colleges, and I’ll bet when he arrived at the one he picked, he’s working hard to learn. I hope we get updates on that young man, but we’ll probably never know.

I saw a snippet of something online the other day, in which a contemporary British citizen was saying that he could not aspire to something or other because he was just a lower class person. That shocked me. But we hear that repeated in this country — “I’m just a working-class stiff.” O.K. but what do you want to be and how hard are you willing to work to get there? That is the real meaning of freedom of America.