It’s that time of year again! Politicians that we haven’t seen since the last election cycle have been out in force, visiting every county fair and public event imaginable, promising to do everything from solving world hunger to “creating” new jobs.
Promises, promises.
If we are to believe everything we’ve heard from the past two political conventions, depending upon who is elected we can either count on unemployment being reduced to almost nothing, or no one needing a job in the first place because the government is going to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone anyway.
At the risk of making just about everyone mad, both of these notions are complete nonsense. No one person can make jobs appear out of thin air, and the top 25% of income earners already pay 86% of all federal income taxes. What’s not being taxed today is being borrowed from tomorrow, so where’s the money to feed, clothe, and shelter folks going to come from?
Yet in spite of all my ranting, I’m honestly not so concerned about paternal politicians. After all, they’ve been around since John Adams decided to squelch free speech. Merely nine years after the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights declared that the government couldn’t, President Adams and Congress decided to just do it anyway . . . all in the name protecting the Republic, of course, and the courts actually upheld it as “Constitutional”. The same thing happened in the Civil War, both World Wars, and even today there are those that want to restrict speech that doesn’t fit the mold of whatever kind of speech is the politically correct flavor of the day.
So impossible-to-keep political promises and partisan sniping are as old as the nation itself; much older, really. What I can’t figure out is why so many of us get all worked up about these promises in the first place. Why, in the face of such history, do we still “believe”? I think I know why. Mankind needs to believe, but that need makes us susceptible to the slickest snake oil salesman of the moment.
It’s not hard to understand why when you realize that 42% of college graduates have not read another book after graduating, 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year, 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years, 57% of new books are not read to completion, and most "readers" (to use the term loosely) do not get past page 18 in the last book they purchased. So, it should not be surprising that the average American reads, and I posit, understands at an 8th grade level. No offence to our 8th graders out there, but if this is our level of understanding, the snake oil salesmen are going to have a field day. Oh, pardon me . . . are having a field day.
150 years ago people read anything and everything they could find. Newspapers would be read, passed around, and read again and again, until they literally fell apart. Those that were fortunate enough to have a book . . . most commonly classics by Plutarch or Sir Walter Scott . . . read and reread them over and over. But what I find the most fascinating is that in almost every saddle bag you’d find a Bible. Those Bibles weren’t the dust covered tomes like you might find lying on the coffee table or end table of some of our homes. They were dog-eared, coming-apart-at-the-seems, read-to-death Bibles.
Now I think I understand why we were once a nation of sheep dogs, but now we’re mostly just a nation of sheep.
