For most of our lives, ignorance was a personal matter. You believe hogwash because you want to believe it? That's your business. You never read a serious non-fiction book because it strains your limited capacities? That's your business. You subscribe to no serious national and foreign affairs journals? That's your business. You don't believe in science or even expertise -- for you, every story is a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, your only heroes are men who match common sense and decency against the experts who in your annals care little about the little guy, and none of your repertoire includes men like Jonas Salk who stopped polio and gave away the vaccine to anyone willing to believe in knowledge and decency, or well-trained doctors risking and sometimes losing their lives in medecins sans frontieres, or the researcher who spent five years learning that the most effective way to reduce abortion is not right wing rhetoric about family values but access to sex education, contraception and good family planning -- but it was still your business. You know absolutely nothing about the rest of the world because being an Ugly American suits you? That was your business.
You are so astonishingly ignorant that when Fox and Friends says we defeated a "communist" Japan in WW2, or that Denmark's gentle and civilized social democracy is the equivalent of Venezuela (whose circumstances you don't understand, anyway), you blithely watch them anyway. But it is still your business.
We don't have to like you and we certainly cannot respect you, but it's still your own damn business if you wish to live life as a fool.
But now that your ignorance means you have invited a Russian agent into the Oval Office and your stubbornness means you persist in defending an accelerating Coup (and voting for Trump is not remotely the problem of supporting him now) -- and the damage you will do is horrifying and well-known (as millions of citizens of fascist and communist nations have endured -- if they were not killed outright at home, in camps, or in the gulag) -- your ignorance is our business. Now that many of us will have to soon close down our social media accounts and make plans to move our families overseas because we do not want to be as naive as the Jews of mid-30s Germany, your ignorance is our business. Now that you have not rebuked but encouraged attacks on the media, attacks on dissent, the firing of all those professionals providing the checks and balances we so badly need, the lies, lies, and more lies, the kleptocracy that threatens the livelihood of every American who must count on social security and medicare in old age, vile attacks on the safety and security of school children, or on exhausted children carried to our border by frightened parents running from violence, or against clean air and water because you are blithely and inexplicably craven -- your ignorance is our business.
The incoherence makes no difference to you because ideas no longer matter. Some of you turned on the American icon Harley Davidson because they were not prepared to support your delusions. You have yet to figure out that NFL players are kneeling about racial injustice and not because they want to spoil your Sunday afternoon. Your team is the red team, and that's all that seems to matter to you. Some of you are bright enough to know better, but the game has assumed more importance than the reality -- that Trump/Putin may soon be killing journalists, silencing all critics, immiserating all those whose pockets can be picked, and doing what every dictator does -- just what Putin did -- end term limits by fiat (as he did in 2008 implicitly and then in 2012 explicitly) and carry on looting national resources until the oligarchs are engorged with trillions of dollars taken from us and our children and our grandchildren.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked on the steps of Independence Hall whether he had given us a monarchy or something else, he presciently replied (and I am paraphrasing) "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."
The remarkable story of the American experiment is that we kept it so long. Especially shocking in that one third of us were secret fans of dictatorships all along, and we only learned it recently. (And it is not just the Christo-Fascists who share so much with Putin, but so many others.) But now that your ignorance threatens to end the Republic with a Russian-assisted Coup -- one Putin has been completely open and frank about since 2012 -- your ignorance is our business.
No one ever said you should toss out your conservative values, but we all know Trump/Putin have nothing to do with that. You could have pressured your corrupt Congressional leaders to restrain or impeach Trump and replace him with a sane and honest conservative. You could have demanded they honor their oaths to the Constitution and put country over party. But you did not. So it is our business.
And you should not be surprised that some of us are taking it personally.
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