A Message to those Under Thirty

“Hate your next-door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace.” — Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction” (1965)

Are you fearful? distraught? worried about your future?

You have a lot to worry about. The pandemic is still with us, notwithstanding the pollyannas. Inflation is high, along with student debt. Putin’s atrocious war in Ukraine might escalate. And global warming may already have reached a tipping point, inexorably increasing due to “natural” methane release, no matter how quickly we stop burning fossil fuels.

Worst of all, social relations here at home are rotting like a deer carcass in the forest. That makes everything worse. It immobilizes us.

We’ve already suffered 198 mass shootings in 2022, and the year is only nineteen weeks old. Worse yet, our Congress and many state governments can’t seem to agree on anything besides suppressing votes and women’s reproductive rights. Congress refuses to grant the money that our doctors say we absolutely need to fight the pandemic, future variants and future plagues.

Is this outbreak of hate and dissension just another random plague, like the Covid pandemic and SARS before it? Not hardly. It’s an evil deliberately foisted upon us by political demagogues and media “personalities” for personal gain, wealth, notoriety, and political power. To see how it works at its worst, read Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column yesterday.

Think about that. With all that’s going wrong at home and abroad, some are purposely fomenting hate among us for money, fame, and political gain.

The worst of the worst is Fox’ Tucker Carlson. He regularly peddles so-called “replacement” theory—the notion that pols are “importing” immigrants of color and Jews to “replace” white Christians.

For about a decade, demographers have predicted that the US will become a white-minority nation by around 2045. So the US Census has predicted. It’s not quite as inevitable as the motion of the planets, but it’s a natural process of diversification and diverging birth rates.

But Carlson and his ilk, including many politicians, are using this more-or-less inexorable demographic phenomenon to put Americans at each other’s throats. That makes flat-Earthers look sensible.

If Vladimir Putin and his spooks did this, we would consider it an act of cyberwar. But our own are doing it, for their own selfish reasons. Treason? You decide. But it’s certainly not helpful. It makes literally everything worse, because it makes all of politics personal.

So what can you do to fight back? Two things. First, figure out who’s most at fault.

As the great humorist Will Rogers once said, “Not all Democrats are horse thieves, but all horse thieves are certainly Democrats.” In this case, not all Republicans are replacement-theory racist demagogues, but all replacement-theory racist demagogues are certainly Republicans. Just watch and note how many Republicans “go with the flow” and refuse to call them out. Worse yet, watch how many consort with them, coddle them, laud them, and use them.

So now we come to the second thing. One party—and it alone—is going all in on hate, putting us at each other’s throats. However twisted its moral reasoning, it thinks it has something to gain. So do the moneybags who support this abomination.

So what can you do? Easy. You can spend a few hours finding out how to register and vote. You can avoid long lines, if your state allows, by voting early or by mail.

Then you can vote. Vote for every Democrat and against every Republican. Vote for every office. Leave no vote uncast. Get your friends, siblings and everyone you know to do the same. Do this knowing that Republicans are willfully ripping our nation apart, or coddling and encouraging those that do.

Voters like you, who don’t always vote, can pull off a vast repudiation of Republicans at the polls. You can do this in a midterm election that everyone now thinks the Republicans will win.

If you can pull that off, the ripping apart will stop cold. That may be the only way to stop it.

So make time in your busy lives to register and vote. Do so as if your life depends on it. The quality of the rest of your life surely does, as does the survival of our democracy. And you just might feel safer the next time you walk into a market, school or house of worship.

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