Against, Stupidity, Contending..

I HAVE BEEN ATTENDING my local senior center in my small town for nine years now, and I have truly enjoyed it, have made some meaningful friendships there. After spending years in the classroom with young people, very young people, I was ready to retire and hang with some older humans. It has been good for me. And, I have found that senior citizens possess indeed a great store of down home, homespun wisdom, garnered over decades of life experience, regardless fo their level of formal educational attainment. One needn't have a doctorate in anything to have wisdom; a goodly number of years spent on this planet simply paying attention will do the trick. But for stupidity and willful ignorance I have no tolerance. For, example, if and when I hear some older person warn that we in the United States must never ever allow this to become a socialist country, must not allow socialism anywhere in America - who hasn't heard that tired old conservative lament? - I want to approach the person, suggest that he or she stop receiving Social Security, and inform the idiot, in no uncertain terms, that Social security is nothing other than socialism, socialism in essentially its purest form, here, in America. Anyone old enough to receive Social Security, itseems to me, should be old enough, should have learned enough, it now that Social Security is socialism. The senior center I attend, nearly daily, for lunch and other activities, is full of Trump supporters, I believe. That amazes me, because many of them are ostensibly intelligent, moral, discerning citizens. The more religious the senior, the more likely to be a Trump supporter, which I find telling. The same is true, I am led to believe, across all age groups in America. Deep religious faith and political, economic, and social conseratism go together, despite the obvious fact that the essential message of Jesus Christ, of extreme charity, voluntary poverty, wide distribution of wealth...is straight out of the liberal socialist hand book. Jesus, if anything, was a raving left wing liberal socialist. Raving, because he was an apocalyptic preacher, who constantly warned the end of the world as people knew it was soon coming to an end, that a representative of God would soon arrive on Earth, the "Son Of Man", or whomever, and bring about extreme change, usher in in the kingdom of God. Well, Jesus as dead wrong about that. But he did emphatically instruct people to behave economically like socialists, not capitalists, a demonstrable fact which evangelical conservative Christians will argue against, fatuously, without relent. The most devout segment of the Christian faithful should not be politically conservative, but rather, politically liberal. There are evangelical Chrsitians who understand this, and have defected from Trump. There are even progressive liberal evangelical Christians, though not nearly enough of them. If there were more of them, the Christian religion would stand a much better chance of actually being, on balance, a net force for good in the world, rather than the divisive, controntational, intolerant, stifling, rigid, dogmatic, anti-science behemoth that it has always been, and remains. Trump supporters delude themslves into believing that Trump's criminal convictions are actually a plot agianst him by a politicized judicial system, an insane notion, about as insane that believing in an anthropomorphic deity which concerns himself with human morality and prefers Republicans to Democrats.