No, Seriously, Where has the Sanity Gone?

As with most able-minded Americans, I really should be getting to work and not writing about politics. I have three mid-terms coming up and honestly this is going to squeeze my time a bit. But thankfully I am a college student and have the energy to recover and the time to do as I please.

So anyway, I have to say that as election day looms tomorrow, I am worried about the direction this country is going. Not because I fear Republican leadership or a right-hand turn in national politics. No, I am worried about who is leading that rightward shift and why it is continuing to occur.

As I noted in my earlier post, I cant seem to grasp the concept of why our nation has chosen to ostracize intelligence and take on an ideology of the masses. This so-called "Tea Party" movement is garnering the most attention and is truly becoming a threat to the stability of our national government.

Ignoring the realities of their contradictory platform, this homogeneous group of older, white (except for the token minority, always prominently featured in PR), lower-middle class, uneducated Americans is a formidable foe to the progress of the United States.

We have two basic problems right now: partisanship and failing education. Unfortunately, the rise of the "tea party" is both indicative of and potentially enhancing both of these basic dilemmas.

First of all, the ignorant supporters of this movement have allowed themselves to be hijacked by corporate interests. Embarking on a policy of uncompromising political opposition to anything the Democratic administration puts forward, these so-called "constitutionalists" have served as bait, thrown into the political pool by the elite right in hopes of the Democrats taking the bait and responding with a reluctance to push forward in the face of an obvious mandate for social change in the aftermath of the 2008 election.

And take the bait they did. Allowing themselves to be ambushed by these "average Americans" throughout a summer of town-hall meetings, the Dem's were pushed off of their liberal agenda on health care, battered in what ended up being a largely successful stimulus (although the ignorance of an uneducated populous has failed to recognize the brilliance of this engineered turnaround, albeit slow to develop), and twisted into a foreign policy that, while identical to that of the Bush administration, comes off to the uneducated as weak and "un-American".

Not realizing that they are serving the very interests that seek to prevent their own achievement of the so-called "American Dream", the very interests that continue to outsource jobs and resist job growth, these "Tea Partiers" have taken over the national dialogue and hijacked national politics.

But the even more dangerous implication of the right-wing rise is the fact that it coincides with a growing problem of inadequate education that seems poised only to heighten the ignorance of the American public.

THINK ABOUT IT: An uneducated movement is pushing for the election of candidates who's agenda includes an even further ignorance of education as a government priority, not just on the national stage (which is a debatable subject), but also on the state level. As the right gains more power, power obtained by a necessarily-uninformed populous coming to the polls, the lack of intelligence is sure to continue growing as education is ignored, a trend that itself will further strengthen the political prowess of the right.

This part of the dilemma could honestly keep me writing for hours on end, but as with most of us outside the so-called "tea party", I have work to do and not much time to do it (I would love to have done my own "Tea Party Express" ride across the country, but I have something called a job). Anyway, for the 2 people who read this blog: go vote tomorrow. I dont care who you vote for, just vote and vote with intelligence. Anyone who can justify their vote in a well-written sentence has my respect, even if that vote is for a nutjob like Rand Paul. The problem I have is that I fear the number of people able to do that is quickly dwindling.