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A troubling drought without end in sight

Texas and Oklahoma have suffered the worst drought they have seen in decades. Driving out in rural Oklahoma or Texas, you are bound to pass a few cow pounds. Driving out in rural Northeastern Oklahoma yesterday, I did not pass one that wasn’t bone dry, their exposed sodic bottoms intricately cracked.

Not since the Okies loaded up the old rickety truck, to the point the axels sagged, and set off for California to escape the dustbowl and abject poverty has it been drier. Thanks to advancements in agricultural science we don’t have to contend with behemoth dust clouds moving across the landscape choking all that is below.

The whole nation is undergoing a drought of sorts that also appears to have no end in sight. It’s not environmental or climatic in nature–it’s political. At the national level it feels like we are suffering from a drought of progress.

Before president Obama was sworn into office, top leaders of the Republican Party announced that their strategy going forward was to oppose the president at every turn. They have executed that plan with great success.

The first two years of Obama’s presidency, he was repeatedly stifled by filibusters in the Senate. For the last year the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, many of them Tea Party types, have halted anything the president would hope to achieve, and will continue to do so. Republicans go so far to oppose the president that they will reject sensible legislation, even when that sensible legislation is Republican in origin.

This country is so politically addled that Republican politicians cannot be seen to agree with the president even when the president takes up an idea that was originally proposed by Republicans. We literally have a political system that has been intentionally retarded by politicians acting on behalf of their constituents who have bought into the extreme, toxic rhetoric of the far-right agenda-driven media that tells them on a daily basis that a battle of good versus evil is underway.

We live in a country where the political system has been paralyzed by people who fundamentally believe capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive, trickle-down economics actually works, the only way out of a recession is to cut spending and social services, science is a liberal hoax, and intelligence with the flexibility for nuance and complexity is a vice. There is no changing their minds since they are unwilling to accept facts.

The only hope for progress in the near future is for the Republican Party to back away from the morally, intellectually and psychologically parched edge at the far right, load up the wagons and migrate closer to the center.

Meanwhile, some Oklahomans and Texans will pray for rain if they think that will help, which is fine. What the weather does in the immediate future is out of our control. The political and cultural pickle we are putting ourselves in as country is all about us.

I’m so pessimistic that I believe we will have to wait for a future generation which is more rational, compassionate, temperate and discerning to make it rain.

Here’s to hoping this drought of progress and sensibility has an end–in our lifetimes.