Are you old enough to remember American Walt Kelly’s sage words: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”? And if you knew what those words meant, there is still hope. Cartoonist Kelly died in 1973 but people still make pilgrimages to the Okefenokee Swamp to seek the wisdom of his possum.
Maybe it was just an up-dated Pogo that was the inspiration for Master Yoda in the Star Wars series.
But it was the tight mid-term races in Florida and Georgia that made me think of Walt Kelly’s denizens of the Okefenokee. The swamp area straddles the north-south border of the two states and encompasses more than 1700 square kilometres of wetlands. Despite the Okefenokee being mostly protected under federal and state parks, it continues to be polluted by inconsiderate tourists and locals who consider the parks theirs to despoil. That must be like the difference between declaring an area a protected wetland and providing the funds to help protect it.
It is also similar to the mid-term election recounts that came down heavily on the side of the people doing the recounts.
Someone needs to explain the American electoral system to me. How is that so different from the system in Russia where Mr. Putin and his friends count their own ballots? At least in Russia, they do not say that the opponent lost by less than one per cent. That just rubs salt in the already grievous wound.
Somehow, the results of those American mid-term elections still feel like one-step forward and two-steps back. There is a strong feeling that the status quo prevailed.
Yes, we have been told that things will be different with a democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Somehow, we expect there can be no guarantee of that.
In two years, there will be another election in the U.S. of A. We expect the Republicans will be too cowed or too stupid to try to dump Trump. Will he run for re-election with another horde at the gates of America? Or will another incident just happen that will set him up? Will bigotry continue to work for him? Will nobody call him out for his lies and what an ass he is? Or was Pogo right all along: the enemy is us.
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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry
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