Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

          I’ve used the heading above in Octobers past, as when the Doomsday Clock loomed near midnight or at other times of misgiving.

What scares me now is what may happen to America and its remarkable Democracy. Such a scare, speaking biblically, may be called Legion, for it is many. Lacking space or time to speak of all, herewith some thoughts:

For well over a hundred years we’ve torn down the old one-room schoolhouses and upgraded, rehabbed or completely replaced their successors with learning spaces and technology undreamed of. We’ve been blessed with access to wisdom past and present by those better trained to mentor our minds than at any other age.

So why at this time in history, with an exceptional heritage from lofty minds of the ancient past and homegrown geniuses of our own, does half our population believe that the successor to our eminent line of presidents should be one who is absent all marks of such traditions? Why do half the voters find it difficult to distinguish the truth from lies and favor a personality and character that falls short of those who have led us before?

During early school days I heard prophetic voices admonishing our state of education, that someday we would pay the price for having scrapped morals, ethics and critical thinking from the nation’s curricula. Silly them. Many thought such things fell out of the sky or were part of our nature.

In every sector of the U.S., are kids who never crack a book being shuffled through their school years and graduated amid prideful tears of their parents when the truth was they were suited for nothing but following the road of family knee-jerks and prejudices.

Yet it continues, and is elsewhere exacerbated by a burgeoning caste system of educational opportunity. The result is no morals, no ethics and certainly no critical thinking. We’re back to a hankering for the authoritarians of old who would tell us what to say and think.

Check all the boxes of cultish behavior: slavishly following leaders regardless of their failings; fear of the outside world as a certain threat; distrust of independent thinking; and rejection of the lessons of history that inform prospects for the future. And that’s a short list.

For those who like to be scared (what I call the Chainsaw Massacre Generation) this may be a happy time, but what may actually come to pass risks the worst becoming real and insuperable till all lessons are forcibly learned and life will be a vast hole out of which to desperately dig ourselves.

Lies didn’t matter in the ancient struggle for dominance; despots and dictators got where they wanted by war and terror, after which lies became the truth that kept them in power. Today it’s the reverse: lies that we love and embrace can bring us to being complicit in the conflicts and torments to come.

No more giant leaps for humankind; only great strides backwards. Already we have overturned Roe and Affirmative Action and are banning books and reversing DEI. One hundred years since Emancipation, over 50 years since the 1960s landmark Civil Rights Acts and the death of MLK, Jr. , we’re back to white nationalism.

Now that the worst has happened, dictatorships may spread and even some who have opposed such will start making nice toward them, saying, “Well, they pick up the trash and make the trains run on time, don’t they?” Sound familiar?

Neighbors south of our border have less to do with the silliness of Halloween and more with the Day of the Dead that follows, with little home altars of photos and keepsakes from beloveds past, as they hold and think on those days. If such is your bent, you might include a small American flag and a pocket-sized copy of our beloved Constitution. If they mean much less after Nov. 5, that will be scary for sure.

So what frightens me most? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.