So Do We Feel Better or Do We Feel Worse?

The Republican National Committee has made it official: women don’t matter in this country … or girls either, apparently, not even underage children. For all the obligatory nattering about “the children, the children” usually accompanied by prodigious handwringing, we don’t give a damn about children. We’re about to elect an accused pedophile into the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate.

And I say “we” because this issue is larger than just the RNC or the DNC or the asses or the elephants. It’s larger than the current scandal du jour (or should I say du hour). It’s a testament of something too many of us have already known for far too long from painful personal experience: this country’s moral authority does not exist – and it never has.

When you steal a country from its occupants, and commit genocide to get away with the crime, you have no moral authority. When you build that country on the backs of kidnapped slave labor, and then spend the next couple hundred years after purported freedom criminalizing the formerly victimized, you have no moral authority. When you place profit above all else – above human life, above health and safety, above that oft-lauded liberty for which our forebears were supposed to have died – you have no moral authority.

When you turn a blind eye to the wholesale theft of our planet by an ever-dwindling number of the corporate elite – you have no moral authority. When you swagger around the world, getting in bed with one vicious dictator after another, committing torture and indiscriminate murder and cynically claiming to do it all in the name of democracy – you have no moral authority.

And now, having ripped off the veneer of civility, morality, equality and justice, the true nature of base politics reveals itself. Yes, that is a double entendre because I mean partisan politics revealing the basest human instincts.

While many of us knew that these base tendencies have always been at the forefront of our “leaders” minds, it is unsettling and astonishing to realize the pace of our devolution. The hypocrisy is stunning. The same establishments that enact laws to punish any slight deviation from the code of conduct they prescribe with heavy-handed mandatory minimum prison sentences are condoning the violation of children by one of their soon-to-be-brethren.

And the irony that so many of Roy Moore’s anti-choice supporters claim they’re willing to overlook pedophilia in favor of stopping abortions is absurd. I guess the value of a girl-child ends once she’s no longer in utero.

So now that we are no longer hindered by anything so mundane as morals, or promises, or laws, or justice, or integrity, I guess we can go about the business of destroying ourselves. So do we feel better for having finally put down the heavy weight of those burdens, or do we feel worse?