It's hard to get through the day after the depressing election. Last night, I attended a joint Democratic party to watch the results come in. In our local elections, we did very well: all of our candidates won handily. Early elation over encouraging exit polls, however, turned to concern and then fear as the actual results came in. Today, everyone I know is feeling angry and discouraged.
I've been having a hard time understanding what happened to the country I grew up in. I haven't been able to come to grips with the fact that people just don't care that Bush let OBL walk away, took us into a needless war, and had enriched the wealthy while impoverishing the entire country. How can that be? I've got an idea.
I'm a product of the 60s. After Sputnik, there was a recognition that science was what was going to make the difference. And so there was a huge investment in science and education and a big shift toward "enlightenment thinking" that strongly influenced how my generation grew up. There was a fascination with science, awe of the power that human intellect could achieve, and a real reverence of how science was going to improve our lives.
Now, we are locked in a different confrontation. I think people have decided that the current war on terrorism is actually a battle between Christianity and Islam. GWB is not the only one who thinks it's a crusade. There are a lot of people who feel their faith is being challenged by the war on terror and who are looking to religion for the answer on how to move forward. George Bush is speaking to these people on a level that reason and evidence will never reach. That's why it doesn't matter that Iraq had no WMDs and it doesn't matter that Bush is giving away the wealth of the country to the ultra rich.
The worst part is that the war on terror really has nothing to do with Christianity or Islam, just like it has nothing to do with "hating freedom". I read it as a response to the economic and military imperialism of the United States, which causes the US foreign policy to be little more than a thinly-veiled pretense for exploiting US power to protect the business interests of the ultra rich around the world. The terrorists don't hate freedom, unless you mean "our freedom to prop up regimes that take their freedom away". The conflict also includes elements of fundamentalism versus modernism, but those, I think, are incidental to the overall conflict. But it is more than a little ironic that the terrorists have produced a fundamentalist backlash in this country that has done more damage to modernism than the terrorists could have ever done directly.