Thoughts On Our State of Affairs

This is going to be a short little post on what I’ve been thinking rather than something on data, Excel, finance or otherwise. It comes about because I will be working on updating the ACA section, there is so much going on in the news, and I’m also trying to keep up with my drawing/painting. There is so much turmoil in the news – just a constant spate of bad, terrible, horrible news of what is going on in the world. And it got me thinking about right and left.

I’ve already read that the conservatives (or the right) already have authoritarian tendencies. I think of it as either they want someone to tell them what to do or they want to dictate to people on how they should live. They want a strong leader. I imagine the left (or the liberals) want a strong leader too but they don’t want to give up their freedom. Their desire for freedom is stronger than their desire for a strongman. At least that is my simplistic understanding. Generally, I don’t really keep up with politics so I’m not an expert in this topic.

I generally thought of right and left as being on a spectrum ranging from a hard left through the left then the center before going on to the right and finally the hard right.

But I also think the left may have dictator tendencies. Where do I get this? Two examples: the Venezuela instance where the leftist Hugo Chavez government (a populist socialist movement) has now transformed into a dictatorship and from what has been transpiring in colleges where some students do not allow controversial guests to speak. Again I’m no expert on the history of what has been happening lately but from what I have read, it sounds like these students are being very intolerant of views – they shut down the speech instead of engaging in debates. Freedom of speech means allowing all speech, including those we don’t want to hear and these students seem to have missed that concept.

They don’t allow you to talk about stuff they don’t want to hear, I suspect they want you to believe what they believe, and they seem to engage in quasi-violence to maintain “purity” of thought/beliefs. I’m exaggerating this but there seems to be signs of these tendencies, and to me, it smacks of dictator tendencies.

We already have white supremacists, violent white supremacists, and they are not exactly the elders. They are mostly young men. And we have young college students who won’t allow controversial speech and will do “violence” to keep out such speech (and maybe thoughts too). One is right and the other is left and both seems to embrace violence and some form of authoritarianism.

So now I’m changing my thought on left and right: instead of a spectrum, I think of it as a circle where if you stretch along either the hard right or the hard left path you reach the point of dictatorship. We already have the hard right and we seem to have some section of the young populace traversing through the hard left.

And the Parkland students are rising up because we adults won’t take steps to solve the mass shootings. We’ve had the mass shootings for a couple of years now and yet, there has been no attempt to implement possible solutions. Instead we get “it’s not going to stop the mass shootings”. The kids are rightly tired of it.

Where do they fall in the circle? I don’t know. They seem to be on the left side but there’s an anger there that makes me think that in the future they could traverse through the hard left since we adult won’t attempt to do anything.

So during our kids’ time, we may have dictatorship and civil war, if we survive the Trump era.