A Changing Political Landscape
John Ink2Quill
www.ink2quill.com

There is no doubt that we live in very interesting times. I’m sure many people from the past believed the same but today, in this moment, the Western world is undergoing huge changes. Some people are talking about the end of a mono-polar world and that we are drifting away from the near universal currency – the US dollar. Let’s start by running down the past 2 decades in the West from the focal point of the US.

Here’s one big change in the past 20 years: In the past 2 decades we’ve seen the Western world go through wars, terrorism, technological innovations, a boom in the spread of intellectual ideas. Thanks to the internet media the average person with something convincing to say, or with good looks, or a catchy song or gimmick, they can have their ideas spread all over the globe. People who make videos, blogs, podcasts and the like, spread their opinions far and wide and those opinions are often confused as being facts. Think of all the UFO, vaccination and historico-politic ideas that are mostly just fiction but are treated as fact. And it baffles the mind just how the audience of such ideas really cannot tell the difference between opinion and researched fact. And statistics don’t always clarify a theory either. Numbers can be talked around and misrepresented as so many other forms of communication can be. Another interesting phenomenon is when one influencer makes a video on an unproven opinion that sounds convincing and how other influencers will grab hold of it and repeat what that influencer said and spread it too. That unproven opinion spreads like a nasty rumor. Online rumors really do spread like wild fires. This has only been possible for the past 20 years. The political arena is now a digital marketplace / battlefield. This has clearly changed the politic landscape.

Another thing that has changed is the type of person who becomes president. In the U.S. we had a former actor become president in the 1980s and now we have a wealthy businessman become president. For better or for worse, both brought a different way of thinking to the job. This is a change from the same-old, same-old of every election. Most of our senators, politicians and presidents have a law background. Yes. Lawyers in the U.S. are like the priests class in days of old. The lawyer class hold so much power in the U.S., even when they are redundant and their skillset does not offer much to an elected post. We have political debates where whomever is the more charismatic, better speaker, ticks the most stereotype boxes so to speak, usually wins.

But times are a changing. We had our first president of African American descent, President Barak Obama, but like I said, we have a wealthy businessman as president now and that changes everything. I suspect that President Trump sees the government as a gigantic business and will run it as such. Also, as a side note we did have a president who was wheel chair bound with President Franklin D. Roosevelt but he hid his handicap for fear of being thought of as weak or something. How stupid.

The human experience is so much broader and richer than what can be found in the single category of the healthy person who fits the standard mold. All of the biggest challenges that have been overcome and the biggest contributions to societies come, time and again, from the people who are not perfect in health or who fit some narrow mold. As it turns out, if you try to gauge the potential of our species, most talent and inventions, solutions to problems and innovations come from the misfits of society.

So, what are the results of having a businessman/ tycoon for president? Well for starters he has started slashing what he sees as wasteful spending in the Government to try to reduce the National Debt which is frighteningly large. Will this even partially work? Who knows. He has made massive lay-offs in the Federal Government and keep in mind that the Federal Government is the largest employer in the country and maybe even the world. So the number of laid-off people is in the tens of thousands. These people who were laid off from their federal job were expecting health insurance, pensions and job security until the end of their days. Now they have lost those. And massive lay-offs could not have come at a worse time as the U.S. economy is also battling inflation and job growth stagnation. These are trying times indeed.

Another problem facing the Western World, particularly the U.S., is the political friction within the country. You hear in the Media the talk of red and blue states constantly. I saw, although much less now, people wearing red or blue depending on their political affiliation and getting harassed for it. How stupid. You have people blaming immigrants for problems such as drugs, crime but not the low birth rate. That is because immigration keeps the U.S. population from sinking low. Only 16% of new births are from natives of the U.S. and nearly all illegal drugs coming in to the U.S. are smuggled in by Americans who are not Mexican and don’t even speak Spanish. These are the facts but political friction persists. I will state the obvious and say that immigrants are a huge asset to the country.

So, in these times of political friction, high inflation, stagnate job growth and a clear decline in the standard of living what goals do we need to set in order to make it through this storm of troubles?

I’m just rambling folks.

John Ink2quill

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