[I am] making plans to get the fuck out of Dodge. I would rather be literally anywhere on earth other than the U.S. on January 20th. (Iran! Syria! North Korea! Couldn't be worse than here. Bring it on.) But my passport is expiring soon. The cost for a new one is absolutely shocking! It's gonna cost me 4 1/2 times as much as it did in 2015. Now, you need to be wealthy to live in the U.S and wealthy to leave!
As the indented quotation shows, "ERD" is a real thing! Don't we all love acronyms, nowadays? I have selected "ERD" as a way to provide a shorthand way to talk about "Election-Related Distress."
Of course, we shouldn't discount "Anger," either. I think that there is plenty of that going around, and I could have called the syndrome upon which I am commenting, "Election-Related Anger." However, as you can appreciate, selecting "ERA" as an acronym for the syndrome that I have decided to call "ERD" could have led to confusion. There is, of course, a relationship. NO "ERA" helps trigger "ERD."
The friend who blasted out the message that I have presented, above, bolded and indented, did so back before Thanksgiving. He does have a point!
However, let me belabor MY point a bit - or at least one of the points I like to make in these blog postings. If we truly believe in "self-government," and consider that we are not just a bunch of individuals, whose only job is to look out for ourselves (and if we think of ourselves as part of a greater whole, and understand that we are all involved, and are all implicated, in the conduct of our national government), then the problem with our election results can't really be blamed, at least not entirely, on somebody else. The way I see it, fleeing the country because of our personal "ERD" isn't quite right.
Choosing to flee the country because of one's personal "ERD," in other words, is not a solution that meets the test often offered to determine what is "good conduct." Recently, I commented on the political philosophy of John Rawls. In my blog posting published on the day after Thanksgiving, I quoted an article that said the following:
The philosophy of Mr. Rawls, who died in 2002, is grounded not in self-interest and competition but in reciprocity and cooperation. His most famous idea is a thought experiment: If you want to conceive of a fair society, put on a “veil of ignorance.” That is, consider a way to organize it if you didn’t know your position — your race, religion or economic status.It’s an intuitive idea, similar to the classic scenario of how you might cut a cake more fairly if you didn’t know which slice you would end up getting. The idea resonates widely, since it is, in effect, a political version of the Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — that in some form is found across cultural and religious traditions (emphasis added).
"We are in this together" is another way of saying the same thing! If you, personally, are suffering from "ERD" (as I will readily admit that I am), I think the best solution for the "D" part of the syndrome (the "Distress" part) is to get together with others similarly afflicted, and figure out what we are going to do to return us all to political good health. Then, of course, we actually have to take action, not just comment!
Putting it another way, and to keep those homilies coming: Let's stay here and fight. Not flee in fright.
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