Minority Report

I read a piece this morning about some conservative christian gathering that drew all of 300 people of that persuasion to a hotel in Washington, not counting a whole slew of reporters, to hear possible GOP presidential candidates, Rand Paul and Chris Christie. Evidently they were discussing whether they should take the approach that the country is going to hell and they should do something about that or whether they should concentrate their efforts on helping folks in need. Guns v. butter, I reckon.

I'm not sure what they concluded but, the conversation seemed to be more of the former, peppered with a bit of the latter. Not so much old time religion as more of the new-time religion that says that the country needs to concentrate more on undoing the hellfire and damnation of the Obama administration before they can get around to healing the sick and helping the poor in the name of Jesus. I coulda seen that coming a mile away.

What I didn't see coming was the decision by these good Xtian folks to replace the urinal cakes in the men's room with figurines of President Obama. Yeah. Nothing for the ladies? No Hillary Clinton pads? Why are women always afterthoughts with our Christcons?

Whattaya gonna do? Well, I'm not going to post the pic for one thing. Three hundred-some very odd people, some of them of which were peeing on the POTUS is not exactly a majority in thought or deed. We are really not into majorities in this country as the brochures might indicate. In fact, I'm going to argue that we are heavily into minorities, just not the minorities typically portrayed in the aforementioned brochures.

For example, how many Americans really- really- want to go about their daily lives with semi-automatic assault rifles slung on their bodies and a sidearm on their hip? We're talking about walking the dog, driving to work and barbequing with the Swanson's this Saturday night. How many of our nation's 310 million citizens want to conduct their everyday lives as if America were Beirut on a Tuesday?

The answer is: not that many. I really doubt if it's one percent. If my Math School skills are correct, 1% of (rounding off to 300) would be three million people. While that is a lot, it's still just one percent compared to ninety nine percent (297 million) who absolutely do not want to tote firearms as if they were handbags and cellphones.

It's fairly clear that 1% of our nations wealthiest pretty much run this country. There have been Supreme Court decisions to back this up and, they really don't bother to hide it much. If you were a billionaire Koch brother, wouldn't you want your hand on the stick stirring the governmental stew? Of course you would. As Steinbeck pointed out, we Americans see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Secretly, we go along with the rich running the show because we are one lotto ticket from being amongst them. What kind of idiot would want to raise taxes on his future self?  Besides, rich people are always murdering each other in delightfully wicked ways that are highly entertaining on television and film.

We also are constantly being told that we are a Christian nation even though we aren't. There are lots of Christians in this country, for sure, but, the founders did not set this place up to be a theocracy despite what you might hear these days. In fact, they were against that. Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. That's really how that works. Of course, if you are of a certain religion you think that yours is the one and only and that yours should be the one running the show. Hey- if you don't, they will. And you know how they are....

So, again, with religion we have a minority of folks believing they are the majority. They want to do one hundred  percent of our thinking for us. If you put any of these things to a vote, the majority would vote them down. We are not a nation of gun-toting Xtian millionaires. You can stop printing those brochures right now. These minorities may be pissed off but we are not to be pissed on.