My Blog Week: December 20 to December 26

A Word on the Week

Done With It

The culture creates an era’s beliefs and practices; the society enforces them. This week, a few things that the Trump era has ended.

We’ll start with the notion of core decency. Who would naively suggest, in 2021, that people raised in ordinary families must (for old-timey sentiment) have the emotional wherewithal to resist doing evil, once subjected to light persuasions? Who would feel confident that people whose livings come, in part or in whole, from taxes—farmers, providers of protection and rescue services—would not, many of them, support a party willing to sacrifice lives to the “capitalist” economy, whose anti-tax position also comes athwart its legislative members’ source of income?

Herd immunity? Already, it begins to seem as though millions of cases of a new virus (the entire function of a virus being the melding of itself with its host’s cells to replicate, a thing it can’t do as an unattached organism), provide greater opportunities for the virus to mutate, rather than wiping it out…

Ivy League superiority. Some funded research may thrive at a well-endowed school, but most students are learning things they can learn elsewhere. What makes a school top-drawer should be the sort of adults its culture-within-the-culture produces, because of leadership among professors and administrators; because of examples set, standards a Harvard or Yale graduate is expected to live up to. Trump himself has done a lot for the Wharton Business school, but many of his flunkies and in-laws boast of Ivy League degrees, too…with results publicly available for assessment.

Not getting our rights in writing. Core decency, lack of, again. Apparently people can and will defy the spirit of honor for a loophole that plays well with big-buck donors.

Preciosity of voting classes. Voting carries a responsibility; it’s fair to hold people to it.

Doing business with just anyone. Boycotting is not great, but between boycotting and consumer choice lies a grey area. To finance the business success of someone who is conservative while you’re liberal isn’t much of a quandary. To F. the B. S. of a bigot, a lunatic, an insatiable greed-machine, a rapture nutter eager for the New Jerusalem, a person whose rightism fuels opinions about “the woman’s role”, a person who enjoys abuses against asylum seekers, would be an unreasonable request for most of us. CEOs need to take a pledge, and make it stick. Consumers are right to want definitive statements, when bets are off as to just how awful a corporate head may be.