Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Elementary

For most of my life, I didn't really have a problem imagining that there were people who were smarter than me. I gave my parents the  benefit of this assumption, and my older brother. My teachers were all superior intellects and I needed only to wait for their wisdom to trickle down to me. If I sat in my seat and  paid attention. I've always been pretty good at respecting authority, and if someone was recognized as an expert, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
It was long about the time I was in high school that I had my first real confrontation with how that reality might not be exactly the one in which I would grow old. My math teacher took me out into the hallway and threatened to fail me if I didn't cool my roll in his class. I was surprised to see that I was somehow perceived as a threat to his authority. Me? Was I more clever than this high school instructor of Elementary Functions?
Troubled by this development, I dropped his  class and enrolled in Selected Topics In Math, a course that would fill my credits and get me somewhere safe and dull.
It was this morning when I woke up to the notion that I am smarter than our "President." My problem is that I don't have another country in which I can simply drop into as I wait out the insufferable stupidity that continues to wreak havoc on our nation and planet. A year ago, I was comforted by the idea that the man in charge of the United States was much smarter than I am. He was surrounded  by a group of individuals who could easily teach me a thing or two about governance. Even back in the days of George W., there was the evil genius known as Dick "Dick" Cheney to hang all that cleverness on. Not the guy we have in there now.
On Easter morning, he greeted us tweetly with "I did what was an almost an impossible thing to do for a Republican-easily won the Electoral College! Now Tax Returns are brought up again?" and "Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!" The election is over, now begins the backlash. The guy whose mind works one hundred forty characters at a time is confounded by the resistance to his tiny-brained responses to the world around him. The rallies across the country were made up of Americans who cannot reconcile what is happening to them and those around them. They aren't being paid. They are, ironically enough, being  stirred up by the very social media he tends to favor himself. 
Could it be that the "small group" of protesters are better at organizing than the "President?" Almost certainly. Is our "President" good at estimating the size of a crowd? Almost certainly not. I wonder how he'd fare on an Elementary Functions exam. 

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