The Road to Hell

Chris Rea - The Road To Hell 1989 Full Version
NEA ZIXNH
I think I have finally figured out what is wrong with the Republican party and why they appear to be lunatics. The reason is that they are simply incoherent with rage. Everything this country has been doing for the last 50 or 100 years was done for the best of reasons. We were trying to make better lives for everyone, not just here but all around the world. But now we look at what we have become and it's not pretty. Unemployment is rampant, the divide between the rich and poor is growing ever wider and ever faster. We no longer command the respect of the rest of the world, and there is sizable minority that hates us.
    The Democrats think the solution is more of the same, more social engineering, more government control. Just a little more and we'll turn the corner and things will start to get better.
    The Republicans don't know what the solution is but they are damned sure that more of the same is not it. Nobody wants to hear a bunch of belly-aching unless you've got a proposal on how we can change things for the better, so people keep floating ideas hoping one will strike a chord that will give it some impetus. 
Some of these ideas are really crackpot, but they do get you some attention, and every candidate has to bring something to the fight. Since nothing seems to be working, people keep reaching farther afield for solutions, and since they are all coming from the Republicans and all their proposed solutions are different it makes the GOP sound incoherent. Well, that's okay, they are. We are all grasping at straws here.
    Nobody really knows what the future will bring. Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point comes to mind. (How someone can write a whole book about how one grain of sand can topple the teeter-totter is beyond me, or maybe the part that I don't understand is why so many people bought a book about something so obvious. Maybe because people think we are at a tipping point in our history, or maybe they are hoping we are.)
    Right now in the USA we have a majority that is doing pretty well, financially speaking, and as long as their majority holds, they are going to fight to preserve their current "way of life", meaning two cars in the garage, a cat in the living room and a 30 year mortgage, even if it means going to work everyday at some pointless make-work occupation that they assuredly hate.
    Problem is that the underclass is growing, at least in the USA. Some other countries are making some progress at improving the lives of their citizens, but I suspect that overall the population explosion is outstripping our ability to improve our collective lot.
    So I can kind of understand what's going on with the Republicans. Nobody knows what to do, but if we keep floating enough hare-brained schemes, eventually one is going to catch on and we'll run with it. Or maybe it will just be the scheme of the moment when we do reach the tipping point, and who knows how that will turn out.

Update March 2022 replaced missing video. Screw you, you YouTube posters who disable embedding.