Obamamania?

If you can believe the news reports, e-mails from assorted political organizations, and ordinary discussion with friends, neighbors, relatives, or even total strangers, Americans are getting completely fed-up with conditions in this country today. Politically we’re about as divided as we’ve ever been throughout our history, with a lot of serious talk of succession. We’re threatened by common criminals, Mexican drug cartels, and Moslem terrorists. Our government seems riddled with corruption and favoritism, while our elected representatives carry on like there’ll be no tomorrow (do they know something I don’t?). Morality seems a thing of the past, and we appear to be developing a hedonistic culture where anything goes. Our economy is on the rocks, unemployment is at record levels, the national deficit is skyrocketing, and we’re in the midst of yet another unpopular war. Personal income is plummeting while living expenses are out of sight and still increasing. Conservative and Liberal extremists are at each others throats, with even the moderates being forced to take sides. All in all, it’s not a very pretty picture, and our “bright and shining future” looks rather tarnished at the moment.

One of the reasons that I’m interested in history is that I like to know why things happen as they do, where we go from here, and what can be done about it. So what happened, or is happening? Judge Robert Bork considers the issue to be a combination of boredom brought about by technology, the weakening of religious beliefs, and the “Rise of the Olympians”, an intellectual elite that believes they are the enlightened few who are in business to spread their viewpoint to all “lower classes”, by force if necessary. This is of course a highly simplified version of his complex dissertation.

Technology, in the form of labor saving devices, has relieved us of dawn to dusk exertion of just a few decades ago. Unfortunately, “spare time” leads to boredom, when we fail to find something productive to occupy that time, and boredom inevitably leads to trouble. (Think teenagers with “nothing to do”.) With that technology comes the fact that fewer people are needed on the farms. So, the folks who used to be farm hands eventually migrate to the cities in search of work, and what used to be a hard working rural population becomes an urban population that may or may not be on the dole, and may or may not be spending their time in the local pub. At the same time, when your greatest worry is a temporary failure of the cable TV system instead of a potential crop failure and starvation, religion seems to hold little appeal to most people. And with the decline in religious beliefs comes a matching decline in morality.

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, did a study of national demographics, and points out some interesting facts concerning last November's election, and the “who voted for who” differences:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 McCain: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 McCain: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 million McCain: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Obama: 13.2 McCain: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory McCain won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..." In short, Obama territory was the densely populated crime ridden inner cities and their environs.

It would seem that today we’re no longer a hard working, churchgoing, mostly rural country. Today, well over half our population consists of urbanites. Professor Olson also believes the United States is presently somewhere between the "complacency” and the “apathy" phases of democracy, with nearly forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" stage, and things look to get a lot worse before they improve. ‘Course the “inevitable march of civilization” is a very ponderous, slow moving process, and in reality there isn’t much that can be done to alter the things we don’t like about it. On the bright side, from my viewpoint at least, civilization is something that evolves over thousands of years, and I don’t expect to be around to see whatever the next stage will be in its entirety. But for today, if we ignore political events, and don’t put up a fight, we’re certainly going to fall victim to that future civilization, long before it’s time.