Thursday, January 7, 2021

Old Time Elections

It appears the Election Show has broadcast its finale. Quoting the BBC news:

Discussion on Gab and Parler, social media platforms popular with far-right groups banned from Facebook and Twitter, featured threats that anything other than Congress overturning the outcome would lead to "patriots" having to rescue their country from traitors, communists, Satanists and paedophiles.

My question is, is this list of "traitors, communists, Satanists and paedophiles" in increasing order of evil or decreasing order of evil? Are pedophiles more evil than traitors or are traitors worse than pedophiles? Are communists more sinister than Satanists or are Satanists worse than communists? I'm just asking.

Can we imagine this exchange?

"You're a traitor!"

"At least I'm not a communist!"

I suppose the absolute worst would be a communist traitor.

This guy looks like an upstanding, reasonable, and law-abiding citizen.

"Only in America," I am tempted to say. But other countries have their own crazies. You don't usually see them because they are not normally invited out by the Head of State.

It's now Thursday and at 6am the crazies appear to have dispersed and returned to their homes, hospitals, and psych wards. A few have gone to the morgue. Death is a risk you take when you break into the nation's Capitol and loot, vandalize, and threaten legislators while Congress is in session in that very same building. Maybe that fact wasn't obvious to Trump supporters.

I miss the "old" America, the one where people were normal except for the occasional eccentric geezer who would chase kids out of his yard while holding an unloaded shotgun (for the intimidation factor). Supporters of a candidate who lost didn't riot and try to take down our democracy. I grew up in Olden Times and when we held an election the winner gave a speech and the loser walked away, and then it was on to new business. People scraped their "Vote For Whomever" stickers off their vehicles and drove to work. Nobody got crazy and nobody died. Everybody was cool with the outcome of the election, because that's how democracy is supposed to work. And that's how democracy used to work in the USA.

Yup, I miss those days.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately times change. I wish also that the elections, politics and candidates will be in the same way that were maybe 50 years ago. I used to help in every election period and it was fun, it was like a party, everybody used to go out with their flags, flyers, music, etc anouncing that belong to certain party and they were proud and everybody respected that and as you said, the candidate that won had a speech and the other shaked his hand and walked away. NOW? I feel ashamed of what they do and how they handle the elections. And is going to be worst.
Thank you for the way how you let us open our eyes. Nice blog!
TA