Gleefully Pointed Post
To my own surprise, I am very moved by the voter turnout in Iraq. I was prepared to hear that they had all been intimidated by the insurgents and had stayed home, or that the insurgents had mounted a far-reaching and deadly campaign across the entire country and slain hundreds or even thousands, because face it, these guys are a) nuts, and 2) the closest thing to real human Hitler-style evil that’s abroad in the world right now.
But the voters showed up, the terrorists tried to kill some voters, succeeded a few times, but in one case, reported second-hand by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, a stolen ambulance full of grenade-tossing terrorists was swarmed by voters and the bad guys held for the cops. Cool. Iraq on!
Humans are not perfectable as they are, and human institutions aren’t either, no matter what the airy-fairies say. The fact that we’ve got this far in the West impresses the hell out of me, given how we all started, and how badly we’ve done elsewhere, and given all the experiments in human governance that have gone before.
It may be that in a memetic sense, democracy is virulent and contagious.
Nothing’s perfect, and hope now doesn’t in any way foretell or guarantee something good or better in the future, but hope for the future is all we’ve got, for anything, or about anything. And for people too, individuals, populations and species.
It’s always a fight though.
‘Here’ is often better than ‘there’, because we know ‘here’, even if we don’t like it, even if ‘there’ would be better. ‘Us’ is often safer than ‘them’, because we know ‘us’, even if we wouldn’t trust most of ‘us’ to babysit our kids, even if ‘them’ are nicer people. ‘This’ is better than ‘that’ because we already know ‘this’ and ‘that’ is too hard, although with way more promise.
More, it’s nature versus nurture, gene pool versus meme pool, accidentally sapient apes versus the better angels of our nature, Earth versus the Flying Saucers.
Okay, that last one refers to the Earth we know, our own ways and ideas, in a survival battle with our fears and dreams for the future, an undiscovered country, where we will always end up living, even though we never get there.
Amn’t I clever.