Cruelty and stupidity on display – 30 tons of food rotting in TX because Convict Donnie and MAGA hate helping non-white people.

I’m not a religious person, but there *is* something biblical about all this. It feels like pure evil has made its way to the top of our government and is happily spreading pain and suffering in every direction. Not sure what we did to deserve this, though the elections show that there’s a lot of latent hate in the hearts of half of America. We’re just as tribal as those in the Middle East – we hate and strike out at anyone not in our tribe.

That may be humankind’s core defect – tribalism. It’s deeply, deeply ingrained in us. It’s why it’s so easy to divide us. Somewhere in all this is a key to putting the country back together again. We need a common identity. We had one in WW2 – every person could join the tribe of anti-Nazi’s and anti-Pearl Harbor bombers. A common enemy is a powerful uniting force. But is that the only way to generate a national identity for the US?

A pandemic didn’t do it. We could have all rallied against our common enemy, the virus, but wedges were driven around issues of vaccination, virus origin, countermeasures (masks, drugs, and lockdowns), so all the pandemic did was create new weird micro-tribes. While we were in isolation, an unhelpful factor.

Musk’s attack on our government’s very structure isn’t doing it, because a significant faction of MAGA are actually nihilists – they just want to tear it all down. Their hate and fear has made them unhinged, unable to see that government structure, while imperfect, is a helluva lot better than rule by force, middle ages style.

An alien (I mean extraterrestrial) invasion *might* do it, but the stakes are pretty high for that scenario. A significantly advanced space-faring foe might be impossible to defeat. The real thing almost certainly won’t be an Independence Day remake. We’re more likely to be enslaved or eradicated. The best we could hope for is a benevolent alien dictator, as in “…OK children, time to stop squabbling. We’re taking all your weapons and you’re going to behave. Those of you who don’t, we’ll just store in suspended animation for a century or two. By the way, we like the whales a lot, and they’ve told us horrific things about how you’ve treated them. So it’ll be a while before we allow you any real freedom.”

Given our history and proclivities, it’s more likely that we’ll get the chance to rally around some common enemy in WW3. Unfortunately, given the direction we’re heading at the moment, America might be cast in the role Germany played in WW2. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants?

Gotta give this one some more thought. What can we do to counteract the toxic effects of tribalism?