An unfortunate constant

The current American political climate is an exaggerated version of what is happening elsewhere in the world. The right wing has been radicalized and they are pushing back against cultural change that deeply frightens them. The power structures which existed for decades are being dismantled which brings them a discomfort they cannot bear. It's taken on biblical proportions with the loonies out in full force to show the full potential for human idiocy.

This coming election will be arguably the country's most consequential because it pits two fundamentally different visions against one another. One is trying to move into the future and find solutions to current very challenging problems while the other is trying to stem the tide of cultural change that shakes them to their core hence the efforts to take the world backwards.

Today Lawrence O'Donnell featured a story about a young woman from Georgia named Amber Nicole Therman who died in 2022 two weeks after the state enacted its very stringent abortion ban. The death was entirely preventable but physicians were too afraid to face prosecution and so she died leaving a young son behind who will grow up without a mother. All this because they denied her a simple procedure after she had taken an abortion pill and she was not able to expel all of the fetal matter.

This is not normal but if these movements are allowed to take society backwards, Margaret Atwood's novel of The Handmaid's Tale will not seem all that far fetched.

When I was growing up I felt that we were somehow moving towards enlightenment but I was not as well versed at the time as to the pendulum of history or the capacity for human stupidity and ignorance that was to be a constant in my lifetime and well beyond.