angry or stupid

            Anger, frustration, disappointment, disillusion—all these can be powerful factors in motivating  behavior.  A creep tries to hit on your girl friend and when she rebuffs him, he slaps her around and calls her a slut.  When you hear about this, you’re overwhelmed with anger, so you grab a baseball bat and play T-ball with the creep’s head.  Watching him drop in a heap provides a real sense of gratification for you, but then the cops show up and haul you off to prison.  Unfortunately, when emotion drives our behavior, short term-gain often leads to long-term pain.           

            In the political arena, emotion-based behavior very often results in people voting against what is clearly their best interest.  I can’t help but be reminded of that when I think about some of the candidates who won big victories November 2.  The specific examples are legion, but in the interest of time and space, let me focus here on just two of them: Rand Paul and Mario Rubio.

            I was born and grew up Kentucky, so this isn’t the first time I’ve looked at a Kentucky election and wondered what the hell were they thinking about.  Kentucky is a state that basically has three industries: coal in the eastern third, horses in the central third, and bourbon everywhere.  If you head east on I-64, about the time you cross the Kentucky River, you’re in Kentucky coal country.  It’s often called mountain country, though jagged hills would probably describe it better (the tallest mountain, Black Mountain, is only about 4,800 feet high).  In some places, you’re in the foothills of the Appalachian range; in others you’re in the Cumberland range. 

            In either case, it’s an area of rugged looking hillsides and deep valleys, most of them cut by one of Kentucky’s numerous rivers and streams.  When I lived in Kentucky in the 1950’s, it was one of the most scenic areas of the country, truly a feast for the senses to drive, or better yet, hike through.  No more.

            As I said before, this is coal country—as it was in the ‘50’s.  Whether the rapaciousness of the coal industry has grown exponentially since then, or perhaps just its technological capacity, the rape of the land then is nothing compared to now.  Now, as you drive along any road in coal country, what you will see is hillside after hillside where literally the entire side of the mountain has been scraped away.  If you look high enough, you’ll also notice that in many cases, the top of the mountain has been blasted away.  And if you look at the streams and rivers running along the valley floors, you’ll see where everything that wasn’t coal has gone.

            Nor is it just the topographical environment that the coal industry has destroyed.  My oldest daughter spent a summer in the ‘90’s performing with an outdoor drama in Prestonburg, which is heart of coal country.  We went to see her and started the visit by checking into (as I recall) the one motel in town.  We unloaded the car, unpacked our bags, freshened up a little, and went back to the car to go to dinner.  We had been in the room for maybe 45 minutes.  When we got to the car, I was horrified to realize that I could literally write my name in the fine rock dust that had settled on it.  WE WERE BREATHING THAT!

            The point of this?  The people of Kentucky, including a significant majority in eastern Kentucky, elected Rand Paul who has made clear that getting rid of what federal regulatory agencies still exist  is one of his top priorities.  They voted, in other words for a man who would make it even easier for the coal industry to rape the countryside, pollute the streams, and foul the air that they have to live in and breathe.  It no doubt made them feel better when they cast their ballot to figuratively smack Washington insiders in the face, but at what cost to themselves, their children and their children’s children?

            Then there’s Rubio in Florida.  Though the number of seniors retiring in or to Florida has slowed some in recent years, Florida is still one of our grayest states, and no one gets elected to state-wide office there without polling well among seniors.  And while Rubio’s embrace of the Tea Party smacks awfully of a marriage of convenience, he did very carefully toe the Tea Party line during his run against Charlie Crist, which means that, among other things, he espoused doing away with Social Security and replacing it with private investment accounts.  This on the heels of the 401(K) debacle a couple years back in which literally thousands of people saw their retirement incomes  disappear almost literally overnight. 

            I have money in an IRA account myself, and I vividly remember two years ago watching $20-30,000 disappear from that account every quarter for a year.  I’m retired, and while I don’t depend on Social Security for my retirement income, if all I could depend on was that IRA, I’d be worried, very worried.  It’s inconceivable to me how the many, many seniors in Florida who had to have experienced, like I did, the rapid withering of a private investment account, would vote for someone who wanted to ensure that such an account would be all they had to retire on.

            At what point does anger simply become another word for stupidity?