As I found myself in storm-safe, albeit snowy, Columbus, Ohio, during Sandy’s rage up the East Coast, I was thinking that I should rage about the in-your-face absurdity of Global Warming deniers; an eight hundred-mile-wide killer storm roiling up the too warm October waters of the Atlantic…how could anyone deny that? I was prepared to cite scientific examples and attach photos from James Balog’s, Extreme Ice Survey, (at least recommending that everyone watch his documentary, “Chasing Ice”), but, then it dawned on me that much smarter, more persuasive men and women of real science have made all of the arguments more eloquently than I could ever muster, and in the dirt-kicking, wall-banging, road-rage-screaming melee in my head, (a state I like to think of as ‘relaxed me’), I settled on the following:
Tuesday will be the end of the most costly, contentious presidential campaign in history, sorely lacking in civility, truth and decency. Beginning with the cartoon-like side show of assembled geeks and freaks, (sorry geeks…I’m referring to the midway kind that sit in a pit and bite the heads off of chickens…you know, like Michele Bachman), which will be immortalized in absurdium as the 2012 Republican Primary, and mucking its way through the post convention push to November 4th, there is one glaringly fundamental difference between the candidates and the philosophy they represent, which, for me, trumps, (not the moronic Donald kind), all else.
However the Republican Party evolved, (they’d never go there), into the patchwork crazy quilt of Tea Partyers, Evangelicals and nay-saying oligarchs, the result has been a disturbing overt pride in their lack of humanity. [Here’s where I apologize to my Republican—Conservative—friends who I know to be caring and decent]. They stand on the wrong side of every important issue: Universal Health Care, Free and Equal Education, Government Regulation over the crippling, run-amok mega banks, Clean Air and Water, Un-asterisked Equal Human Rights…did I mention global Warming…FEMA? Every challenge, in Republican-speak, to these issues comes with the spin that the Democratic demonizing of unfriendly and irresponsible ideas such as “Clean Coal” and privatization of…well, everything, indicates how fiscally out of touch those tree-huggers must be.
I guess, for anyone who actually thinks that Atlas Shrugged has literary or philosophical merit, joining hands to shun decency for profit may be appealing. But, let’s stop pretending what’s really at stake for the future of our country, where the choice on Tuesday could not be more clear:
I CARE I ONLY CARE ABOUT ME