By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission
Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.
That was January 2020.
Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.
For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.
It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.
Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.
As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.
Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.
It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.
That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.
Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.
Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.
A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.
And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.
We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We crave spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.
We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.
It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.
Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.
Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.
Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.
Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.
It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.
In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.
They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.
The clear intent of the bill is to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.
Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.
America’s love affair with swaggering ignorance and confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need to be paid. The damage will be extensive.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
Thank you for reprinting this, Bruce. It’s exactly what I think every single time I read a history book or take a look at world news. People are just so damn ungrateful for what they have and what others have done for them. I don’t get it, at all.
Thank you for this Bruce. Remember when Trump said that Covid would be gone by Easter (2020)? I remember when mom said that to me. Whatever Trump said (actually whatever Christiane Northrup, The Galactic Federation and The Golden Age of Gaia said, she repeated). All those people who died were suppose to die according to her because they had a contract to die then (reincarnation stuff.)
I remember when Trump came down the escalator. A type of depression set in because I thought, **** he’s going to be the President. Remember when he got back to The White House after being in hospital with Covid. He tore that mask off and was pissed. How dare Covid attack me? I am the President of the United States! And like a typical personality disordered person his cruelty rose to the occasion. The same with my mother.
The lying is just awful. It reminds me of the lying in church. Lying was okay for the cause of Christ. Lying was okay for the power and control. Lying was okay for the money. Violence was okay for all those reasons too. What a mess.
I have lost faith in fellow humans. Not everyone, of course. But I had naively assumed humanity were in a forward trajectory toward a Star Trek type United Federation of Planets where equality, diversity, knowledge, and respect are celebrated. Instead, we see nations lunching toward the ugliest oppressive behaviors led by bullying toddleresque leaders. WTF is happening?
All good comments, and like ObstacleChick said, “WTF is happening?”. It’s as though the adults have left the room, the children are running rampant, and there is some kind of anti-intellectual push to wipe away human progress.