After Thoughts, BEFORE the Elections

By Andrew Lidden Pate, Jr.

Evening of November 5, 2018—What have we learned from the Mid-Term campaigns leading up to November 6, 2018?

#1—If we are to survive as a democracy, we must find a way for a clear majority of us to rally around our nation’s basic values.

#2—We must all become aware of how modernity has made us dependent upon authority figures to do things for us, heightening our desire for demagogic leadership.

#3—Too many of us lack a working knowledge of our country’s history. That has to be changed. We, every single one of us, must relearn our history.

#4—Our conscious awareness of our spiritual heritage has waned from our collective memory. The values of our great religious and spiritual traditions are still present, but they are active in ways unfamiliar to most of us, and too often wrongly attested to by popular clergy.

There are more lessons to be learned from the political happenings of the past two to four years. Fundamentally, they tell us that our life together has changed and that we have an urgent need as a people to get ourselves updated.

We learn to tolerate despotism, I believe, even to desire it, out of laziness and pure ignorance. Consequently, we let ourselves be influenced by almost anyone who makes a hard sell to us, like, you know, “vote for us and we will definitely make you younger and richer, and you won’t have to do a thing.” Sadly, in this deterioration, we have come to tolerate lying as an accepted way of doing politics.

We can do better. We must.