Instant Gratification

This is the only message I can get out of what happened yesterday. There's often a difference between what "feels good", and what "is good".  Sometimes, you have to delay gratification beyond the instantaneous "good
feeling" in order to realize ultimate good. Some people, many people apparently, need some sort of reminder that what FEELS good isn't necessarily what IS good, and instantaneous gratification may in fact undermine what in fact IS good.

If God represents the ultimate good, then deference to God is the process that one might use to delay gratification. If common sense points to the ultimate good, then common sense would be the method. Of course, believers who also have common sense have two methods of accomplishing this goal. But for those among us who lack God and also lack common sense, there is no method that allows for delayed gratification, and in fact, delayed gratification would be a negative, something that at it's very core contradicts the belief system they have that substitutes for and masquerades as common sense in their minds.

Having said this, I still don't know what the answer is. The same people who voted wrong in this election will be even more energized to vote wrong in the next election, because they will continue to blame the same people
and reasons for why things are as bad as they are. Their response will be to continue voting for the people who offer the most immediate form of instantaneous gratification, since that is of course the most obvious fix
for the problem, isn't it? In the meantime, more young people will come of voting age, and more of them in an accelerated fashion will have been educated via materials, methods and educators who have molded the youngest generations leading up to this point.

We are outnumbered. There are more people poking holes in our ship -- for what they believe are good reasons -- than there are people trying to fix the problem. The only thing we can do is to continue bailing as the ship
sinks. If the ship sinks, it sinks. We will have stuck to our morals and values, and we will have tried our best. Maybe we'll think of some way to bail more efficiently. Maybe the ever-worsening conditions will at some
point shock the other side to reality. Maybe history repeating itself will become apparent to them. (Although it seems to me that history isn't currently repeating itself, we are in uncharted territory. We are in the realm of the fall of the greatest national force for good in the history of the world) If we don't succeed, then we don't. But again, we will have stayed true, and we will have done our best. That's all we can do. Welcome to day one of the new America.