At two–plus years into the Trump presidency, I’m still scratching my head as to how a billionaire from New York City captured the hearts and minds of rural America to such an extent that almost half the country continues to support a regime whose major accomplishment has been to accelerate the consolidation of wealth into urban and offshore banking centers.
We have a president whose behavior no sane, moral person would want their kids to emulate. We have solid rural support for a president who has no interest in what happens in rural America. There’s nothing in it for us.
Our political divisions pale compared to the threat posed to our dignity and human agency by the unchecked proliferation of artificially intelligent technology. The pace is almost impossible to register – it still feels like a sci-fi movie to me. Suddenly there are self-driving cars and tiny drones that can kill you, and enough data about each person to make hiding seem impossible.
This is a plea to the healthy skepticism of my fellow rural voters, that in the face of artificial intelligence and other real threats to all of us, we must demand the moral realism of our leaders. Instead, we have a lewd circus show and a drunken war machine.
The only genius of this administration is its aptitude for distracting us.
Ole Bye
Cortez
