I was intending to write about something else today. I was going to write about the recently released intelligence report reiterating the fact that Russia interfered in both the 2016 and 2020 elections with the intent of supporting Donald Trump and denigrating first, Hillary Clinton, and then Joe Biden. However, I read Heather Cox Richardson’s blog and she tackled the same issue so I will just defer to her. The link to her blog is below.1
And then I read something in today’s paper in Bozeman that really struck me, and I thought was an extremely cogent argument against the Montana legislature’s continued effort to push laws that are based upon nothing more than personal prejudices and biases and are, in fact, solutions in search of problems. [If this were isolated to Montana it would be one thing, but this type of thing is going on across the country in many Republican controlled state legislatures]
The real problem is more than the fact that these types of laws are based simply upon personal prejudices. It represents a much bigger problem that shows many areas of this country are wasting resources solving problems that aren’t really problems while ignoring some major existential problems that threaten the very survival of this nation. If the United States of America were viewed as a single-family residence, the Russian interference in our elections and ongoing dissemination of divisive information represents a termite infestation that is slowly eating away at the very structure of this house. It’s hidden in the walls and easily ignored – but nonetheless no less devastating in the long term.
As I have pointed out repeatedly in these blogs, the threat from China is of a different kind. It’s like the Chinese are buying up and making alliances with all of the neighbors surrounding the United States ‘house’ in their masterful game of ‘neighborhood Go’ so that they will eventually become the dominant resident in the neighborhood. And rather than developing a long-term strategy to deal with either of these issues, it seems like many of these state legislatures want to argue about and spend their resources on deciding what color to paint the living room. The fact is, it won’t matter a damned bit what color the living room is if the house eventually falls down due to the termite infestation and China just buys up the lot. It is way past time for the politicians in this country to start solving real problems and stop wasting time and resources on all of this meaningless bullshit.
The column below written by an elite female athlete here in Bozeman just shows the waste of resources that is going in to solving problems that aren’t problems and have absolutely no bearing on the long-term survival of this nation and contribute zero to the betterment of this country.
- Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
