By David Swanson
God wants John McCain to win the election. I know because I hung out with a bunch of his supporters at a Sarah Palin rally on Monday and they told me. But it looks very likely that McCain will actually lose the election. Which raises the obvious question: If God doesn’t get what he wants, will he take his toys and go home? Please?
Wouldn’t God be happier working his wonders in private individual lives where he’s better able to have his way? When things go wrong there, it’s because God has a bigger purpose that we can’t understand because we’re the sort of creatures who were dumb enough to believe in him in the first place.
But when God lets a socialist darkie who pals around with terrorists and supports infanticide take the reins of the global empire in the only world he ever created, and which he spent a full six days on without bathroom breaks, surely it’s time the deity began looking for alternative employment.
Am I dreaming the impossible, or might we not use the upcoming electoral defeat of the theocrats as an opportunity to politely ask God to stay out of our government? Might we be able to explain to the shrinking sect of trickledowners, warmongers, racists, and corporatists that if they want to be taken seriously in American public life they have to stop glorifying ignorance and subservience and exhibit some signs of contact with thought or knowledge?
Just an idea.
When you watch this video of these people explaining how they think, it’s tempting to conclude that they mean well and are trying to get it right but are just misinformed, just have some facts wrong, have just watched too much Fox and don’t know these sorts of things. But if you pry just a little further, you discover that they don’t want to know. They aren’t prepared to consider that their nation might have ever done anything cruel. They don’t want to consider the possibility that we might be responsible for any suffering or responsible for failing to alleviate it. They aren’t open to considering that some of the scary things they’ve been told have been told for the purpose of scaring them, that some of the myths they’ve been told about the need to enrich the wealthy have been told purely to enrich the wealthy. They’re deeply frightened, even before turning on Fox, and they have never imagined that they themselves might have played any small role in anything that’s ever gone wrong in the world. Why should they when there are so many people to blame who have darker skin and funny names and like to kiss people with whom they cannot procreate?
So here’s my proposal: We need to make perfectly clear to these people that they can never again impose their bigoted bronze age views on the rest of us through our democratic republic. They can play with their fairytale action figures at home, while we work on providing a system of education and public communications that will make it far less likely that their grandchildren will ever be so pathetically stupid and insecure.