One of my “rules to live by” has always been
“Never attribute to malice what can be fully explained by ignorance.”
After listening to my US Congressman interact with my fellow constituents yesterday, I’m thinking I’ve been a little harsh.
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As a great fan of your books, and being quite interested in the creating/promoting process you often speak about, I hope you will manage to refrain from inserting politics into your morning rambles.
I’ll do my best, Joyce. It’s one of those things that reasonable people can disagree on and doesn’t necessarily have a place in my morning walk.
Sometimes I get caught up in the negativity and need to talk about it to vent. I find it aggravating that people who *should* know better, don’t.
I find it *particularly* aggravating when that person is me. 🙂
However, if reasonable people don’t talk about it, then who’s left? The nutcases in DC? While I have to say I wouldn’t particularly enjoy you discussing it every day for the whole walk, the occasional ramble when it comes to mind is good for me.
Part of the problem is that we disagree who the geniuses and who the morons are, and *that* evolves from differences in the basic axioms that we feel should guide government. The most volatile one currently is whether or not the government, especially the federal government, should be involved in charity/redistribution of wealth.
Plus, the development of hyper-abundances we have going on means that soon, all of our economic systems are going to be distorted beyond recognition. While he really only discussed it in two novels – _Beyond This Horizon_ and _For Us, The Living_, Heinlein had an interesting approach based on Social Credit theory. I’m not sure it’s good – I don’t see how it relates to interactions with other nations, for example, but it’s definitely different from the usual proposals.
Me, I’m a libertarian (small l, please, not a member of the Libertarian Party), and I tend to piss off both sides of the current political system.
Now, if we could just get more people to vote 3rd party – any 3rd party – we might could break this two-party system that causes a lot of this rancor.