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The Renaissance We Need

The Republican hypocrisy of Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has now reached such levels of contempt and indignity that both should be run out of office.

Both governors have made wild threats to local school boards, administrators, and teachers for wanting to keep their faculties and students safe. They are forbidding mask mandates and other safety measures for schools, which ought to be the legal choice of any local community.
At the same time, Abbott and DeSantis are asking the federal government for help with the Covid virus and its variants. Both Texas and Florida are running out of medical staff and ICU space to handle the growing increase of Covid patients.
Somewhere in all of this voters have to decide if they want to live in a country where political leaders actually govern in the best interests of their citizens, or if they want to be ruled by political lightweights and grandstanders who cater to elite investors in their political fortunes but manipulate and then ignore the hard working, ethical voters who put them in office.
History tells us that during the Renaissance, that period in European history from the 14th to the 17th century, civilization “rediscovered perspective.” Coming out of the Dark Ages, a time filled with ignorance, superstition, and barbarity, the Renaissance brought a resurgence of rational thinking, spiritual awareness, a love of art, culture, unity, and human compassion.
If it’s true that history repeats itself we can only hope for our own Renaissance.
Today, we are in America, mired in some gruesome darkness of our own. The brazen, impudent hypocrisy of Abbott, DeSantis, and the entire Republican leadership, is a damning influence across our nation.
President Biden seeks to lead us out of this. But without the cooperation of rational, reflective, sensible politicians and other national leaders we will remain in this Middle Ages failure.
To continue to give value to ignorance, wild conspiracies, religious superstition and moral dereliction, arrogant self-centered rebellion and lawlessness, is to slowly but inevitably move us into a backward and vagabond nation. Europe slogged through the slime of that and was nearly destroyed by it. Thankfully, the Renaissance pulled them through.
An American Renaissance is our only hope. We can love again beauty, Art, theater, science, medicine, law, spirituality, intelligence, education, peace, and unity. We can honor friendship. We can demonstrate generosity and human warmth.
We can and we must “rediscover perspective” and end this flat, lifeless, dead atmosphere of American darkness.
© 2021 Timothy Moody

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