Two—quite different, and unrelated—things inspired this post.
The first is that the people who provide the good things in life: the city volunteer brass bands, the choral societies, the auditorium, for instance, are struggling. I play with an amateur band, with whom I found myself quite by accident. My wife and I were getting on each other's nerves at home, but, more importantly, she thought I should learn an instrument, and join this band for seniors. So I rented—what turns out to be one of the easiest instruments to play—a Baritone horn (how did they guess that it would suit me perfectly?), they gave me lessons, and I was off and, well, walking. All of them, to my suspicious eyes, seemed to be professionals; hardly ever played a wrong note; wrangled the sheaf of sheet music they were given like pros.
Many of them belong to a semi-professional band in town, an almost symphonic band, and they handed out advertisements to their major performances at our rehearsals. So my wife—whom I shall refer to as Katie, for short—and I put on our glad rags, and went.
It was a spectacular performance. (I almost called it a show) by any measure. For various reasons, it was not as huge a turnout as they had hoped for, but still very substantial. But the band, and the large town choral society, were clearly hurting for cash. Katie and I placed all the ready money we had with us into a collection tray, but they were not going to clear a huge amount for their coffers. These are tough times for the Arts, and the government has stopped a lot of funding for the Arts, so there's virtually no trickle down for community band concerts. In fact, the band members—even us, in our tiny Seniors band—have to pay something, for the band expenses: rehearsal room, instrument rental, instruction, sheet music, insurance, etc, etc. It is the same for each of the musical groups: the bands, the choral society, etc.
But, consider: most of the band members take time off, all through their school years, to go to music lessons, and instrument lessons (I took piano, which explains why I had to have baritone lessons at this advanced age), and put in their time playing in school bands, etc. So it's a long hard road, just for the privilege of being able to entertain people.
Half the people are probably thinking: jeeze, that does sound like a lot of work. The other half are thinking: why do these people put themselves through this drudgery? The answer, of course, is that it was fun, and honestly, still is!
The second is something a lot of us are struggling with. Let's not focus on pres 47, because he isn't typical. He's just a TV personality, like the other media figures who have been picked to run the Administration. I have been puzzling over what ideas are driving the typical MAGA sheep?
One thing is: charisma. (Sp?) They're easily swayed by big personalities.
Next, just when they're beginning to think that, perhaps there might be something to say for those losers, the Democrats / Liberals / Communists, the basic Hate that their leaders have drilled into them, with a lot of mythology built on racism and nativism—words that most of us can look up later, because they aren't super useful, except for understanding hate—their leadership slaps them back into the fold, reminding them of all the comfortable hate, and puts their intelligence to sleep.
The mag leadership, where do they come from? Frustrated racism, many of them. In their early youth, they probably bought into the idea, probably pushed by at least one of their parents, that they're superior, just because their parents looked so handsome. They probably eventually realized that good hair and a sharp tongue wasn't enough to compete against intelligence, information, skills and aptitude, just about the same time that they were put together—after years of being only among other wealthy whites—with other ethnicities: Italians, Eastern Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, and African Americans; and naturally conflate these factors. It was these non-anglos, they musthave concluded, who were showing up the chinks in their armor of superiority!! It takes disciplined thinking to reject an obvious wrong conclusion, especially if the wrong conclusion was comfortable, and the correct one was uncomfortable.
Another major source of anger is government corruption. The government itself is not actually corrupt—except for things like voting themselves huge raises, and superior health insurance for life, etc.—but there definitely are crooked Congressmen in all parties, who become poster boys for cheaters. People see their taxes disappear into government coffers, but they don't see the benefits of it. They think that school music programs, the IRS itself, neighborhood schools attended by immigrants and poor blacks, social security and those no-account Veterans are eating up all of it. (Sorry about that crack, Vets; we know that you guys are fine people.)
So ignorance and careless thinking results in a lot of hate. But that's not all. The GOP dance is now being led by people with very complicated axes to grind. They give their followers one reason for destroying the government machinery, but they have different actual motives, which do not help the Man in the Street. Now, of course, they have raised not helping the man in the street into a great virtue. That was the contribution of must. Empathy is a fault. It results in programs for 'useless' (read: foreign, non-white, or unemployed) people. "It's better we keep our tax dollars."
There's a lot of diversity among the Maga, for all they hate diversity on principle. Different groups respond to different things, e.g. inflation, religion, abortion, women, Islam, war, peace, Israel, Iran, the Brits, the EU, and so on.
Hey, this is becoming a diatribe, so I must stop here!! But support the Arts, though I haven't made a clear case for it. Drudgery is good! I'm a math teacher, so naturally I think that way!
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