While we know that our world is being turned topsy-turvy by the things that are happening in it, it can be instructive to look at each of our personal lives before deciding that what we have isn't working.
I hear all the time that what we have isn't working and that it's time to "try something new". Pundits from all avenues in the media do their best in their own gripping way, to convince us that the world is falling apart. In many ways, it is, but one way to look at things has always been the world's effect on one's own life. Take the time to introspect and say, "Is my life going worse now than it was ten or twenty years ago?" In many cases, we are better off than we were years ago. In some things, not so much.
I would say that our freedoms have been reduced in the past couple of decades. I would put the responsibility for that reduction in liberty squarely on those who believe that more government involvement in our every day lives is good. While it may have led to safer playground equipment at elementary schools, it has also led to intrusion into individuals and family's lives that wasn't there in the 1950s, for example.
Those on the left claim that they are worse off, that poverty is worse, that racism is increasing, and that curtailing certain industries in America will affect the world climate enough to reverse climate change and will be worth the vast toll it takes on the economy. The facts don't bear this out. Poverty may be on the rise, but it is a general poverty of a nation that because of intrusive over-regulation, is moving slowly out of first world status. Racism, despite what you hear from the race-baiters and the media, despite what you hear from Black Lives Matter, isn't worsening and has instead seen vast positive changes since the days of Martin Luther King Jr. Climate change cannot be appreciably fixed by the U.S. stopping it's coal production and other extreme measures. These measures are designed to make people feel good about what they're doing and have virtually no impact on world climate.
People have this insane desire to "try something new" when what they have had, has largely been working. On the left, people want to vote for Bernie Sanders because he represents a change. He also represents a profound detachment from reality when it comes to advocating free this and free that, with no money to pay for it. Electing Hillary Clinton for no other reason that because she is female is an idiotic reason to elect someone. People voted for Obama because he would be the first black president, and that was equally stupid.
On the right, people would elect Trump because they are sick of the "establishment" not doing what it was elected to do. Never mind that from all indications, Trump is the kind of man who would be dictator if he could (not unlike Obama), and who has misrepresented himself on many fronts. Trump truly does not represent conservative values, which is another topic in and of itself.
The bottom line is, change for the sake of change, just to "try something new" is a poor reason to vote for someone who will likely make life worse for most people. Though our current system has produced some bad results lately, it is a system that largely has worked throughout American history. Would it not be better to try and find better candidates and encourage statesmanship than to throw out the baby with the bathwater? I'm thinking it would, but then again, I'm more optimistic than some.
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