To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, November 03, 2018
 
What the Trump?

I usually don’t discuss politics or make any specific comments about political developments on this blog. If you go through my blog posts since the time I started it, you’d be hard pressed to find a ‘political’ one, almost as if I exist in a political or economic vacuum. It may be that since my early childhood I was a lot more interested in philosophy (that is, abstract ideas) than in politics (practical administration) (I do understand that philosophy and politics have intricate links but let’s keep that discussion aside for the moment). I also never cared to read the papers—again maybe the disinclination to read the practical goings-on or the dreary language in which they are reported—so I remained quite politically uninformed too. I generally tend to keep mum on topics I don’t know much about.
But…living in current times…living in the age of social media where the political developments are thrust onto your feed even if you don’t go looking for them…I have become more and more attuned to the political side of things. I probably still am ignorant about many aspects of various political debates, but sometimes I feel that you might be able to see some things more clearly if you see them in the simplest possible terms without all the haze surrounding them.
So what is bothering me so much that I decided to write about politics? Well, let me put it mildly, Trump. I never thought I would live to see the day when the leader of one of the most, if not the most, powerful country in the world, one of the most economically advanced country in the world, would turn out to be a character that even in a movie we would all despise as an abhorrent villain...and what is more, such a character would not only be accepted as a leader but would also be welcomed by the majority of this supposedly evolved population. I have to admit that it has made me question whether this country is so evolved after all (no offense to those who do not support Trump of course)…or is it that we were all along mistaking economic evolution for intellectual evolution?
It seems to me that there is a very…I shouldn’t say ‘interesting’ considering how dangerously it affects all of us…but an ‘important’ lesson to be learnt from all of this mess…If we were to analyse the principles on which the US has prospered so far and what those principles have led the population as a whole to value most of all…we should probably not be so surprised that they find the unlikely figure of Trump worth worshipping. Maybe it’s a good thing that this rash broke out the way it did because had it not, the disease would have anyway entrenched itself deeper and deeper without anyone, maybe even the sufferer, any the wiser for it. I guess if we must be optimistic then it is about the fact that we all now know that a problem exists …Trump is only a timely (hopefully!) symptom…and we have to be thankful to him for showing up when he did!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:57 pm 2 comments
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