How in the hell did this country get so stupid that we would elect this imbecile twice?

[love_katz]

61. Agreed.

I keep quoting the British author, Terry Pratchett: " poison goes where poison is welcome".

I can't speak for anyone else here on DU, but I'm not highly educated, in terms of formal education. I have a high school diploma and some very scattered college ( no degree). And yet, I am not a bigot or a misogynist.
I don't think it takes a college degree to see other people as humans and to be in favor of civil rights for all.
I quit watching TV in 1984, after Reagan was re-elected. Feeling angry and horrified, I did a bit of research into what had happened. Can't remember exactly how I heard about it, but I ended up reading the book, "Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television", by Jerry Mander. The book made it clear to me that main stream media was owned by about 5 or 6 corporations. This reflected a consolidation of media, which had been going on for some years. The results are what we see today: a policing of tone and content and a suppression of dissent.
I didn't grow up in a hugely liberal household, and yet I learned to think for myself and began at an early age to reject bigoted and misogynist thought and speech. Something in the hateful and unfair tone of such speech caused me to backpedal away from the people who expressed such ideas.
I am a boomer. I remember the horrible newscasts showing the vicious abuse of peaceful civil rights marchers. I had no trouble agreeing with the movements to achieve civil rights for women and minorities, and to save and protect the life support systems of our planet from the selfish desires of those who would destroy the Earth for selfish gain.
I'm guessing that part of what helped me to avoid becoming a bigot was several things: my parents were not big church goers ( too many churches are fire hoses for bigotry, greed, and misogyny); I grew up on the West Coast, instead of the South or the Midwest, where there seems to be much greater pressure for conformity to bigoted beliefs, and I grew up in a large city, where I had ample opportunity to interact with people who were different than me and my family.
I have always felt an instant revulsion to hate radio or TV, and I prefer to spend my time reading, which is where I have expanded my education beyond what I got in school.
The high school I went to required us to read Mein Kampf and to study the Holocaust. The book, in particular, made clear that Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jewish people was completely irrational. His hatred began with his reaction to a Jewish man he saw one day, while waiting at a bus stop.
Part of me thinks that bigotry is based on something within the person who accepts those ideas and values. As Mr. Pratchett says, through some of his characters, " Poison goes where poison is welcome". They see hate as giving them some sort of advantage, and completely fail to see that we're all connected, that what goes around, comes around. The haters fail to see that their behavior and attitudes will come back to bite them. I think that they know, deep inside, that they are wrong in their treatment of others, but they
just turn away from and deny that knowledge.
Industrial society, the world over, has a profound disconnection syndrome: disconnection from the Earth and all the living beings who share it with us, disconnection from each other as a community, and a belief that people can escape from the predictable outcomes of their actions, because too many of us have been taught to view ourselves only as separate beings.
And, the churches whose doctrine is hate and greed, and the oligarchs who own the media continually encourage us to blame and attack each other, so we won't notice who the real sources of our problems are.