Should we teach our children that pigs can fly?

[image: cafepress.com]

The Daze of Swine and Roses

Let’s be honest: Presidential elections in the U.S. are such contrived spectacles of human activity that we appear to the world to be a circus of clowns high on crack cocaine. Our elections consist of one part stupidity, one part megalomania, and one part money all stirred up in the melting pot of smell-a-vision into an elixir that exceeds the limits that normal humans can digest. If this were not the breeding grounds for advanced ego maniacal behaviors such as those on display by Donald Trump, we would need to invent him.

Our elections are still some 15 months out and already the bombast is so fierce that our sensibilities are battered into a mushy state of submission. The Democrats have their Hillary who is out to claim her unalienable right to gender power, while the Republicans have a wide assortment of candidates all professing no prior residency in a nuthouse, but none able to offer proof of his or her nonresidential status. But at least they are consistent: They all want to repeal the entire legislative package that Obama has put into place, while they kill the Iran deal, and bomb them back to the Stone Age. Another war, another waste of $2 or $3 trillion dollars—if we are lucky. The prospect that the annihilation of 90 percent of humanity might also be at risk is irrelevant to such feeble minds. Is this a great time to be alive, or what?...those who still have their sanity intact are wont to ask.

Where are the great statesmen of yesteryear when a poor kid could study by candle power, and by dint of raw talent, study, and drive rise above the fray and become our guiding light to sanity? Our current crop of pathetic pretenders to the presidency haven’t a clue nor do they care about stability, civility, and the brotherhood of man and woman. Politics American style has now become a clash between two agendas: One group wants to take from the bottom 90 percent and give to the top 10 percent. Their means is as cruel as it is bankrupt: They want to start a war, deficit spend a few trillions of dollars, then recoup their losses by eliminating programs to children, the aged, and the poor to pay for their grandiose idea of spreading a defunct ideology. The opposite camp’s task is to fight for survival. Meanwhile, fossil fuels provide huge profits directly or through stock ownership, global warming quickens, crime and illiteracy run rampant, we grow dumber and dumber versus the world as our education system crumbles, and we render asunder our here-to-fore position as the world’s guiding light that welcomes those who dare to live free.

Do any of our presidential candidates even know the words by Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Most would seem to want to replace those words with: “Stop. Borders closed to those of color. Try again in 30 or 40 years.”

It is easy enough to understand how the office of the presidency attracts such mediocrity. Perhaps we need to stop telling our children that they all can grow up to be president. Wouldn’t it be a bit more realistic to at least tell them about the odds of achieving that goal? There is but one office holder, and currently 320 million residents. Setting high goals is one thing, but we cannot simultaneously stand logic on its head, stir their minds with quackery and exaggeration, and expect to instill normal expectations from them after reaching age 35. That is like getting pigs drunk on wine, and telling them they can all soar with eagles.