Dante’s Sins Updated

Pollyannaism.
We’ll start with that one.  ‘What?’ you say.

You may recall once reading the treacly children’s story starring the little girl of that name.  Regardless, you likely know that playing Pollyanna means thinking, saying, and most likely believing, “Oh, everything’s going to be all right.  We have the strongest democracy in the world….Etc., etc., etc.”  Do we, really?  Still?  We did.

But tell me, honestly:  Can you reconcile such a utopian place as the ‘strongest democracy in the world’ with the country that, as of right now, suddenly is stopping airplanes landing or taking off, removing passengers with passports listing the ‘wrong’ countries of origin?  And does such a ‘strong democracy’ work to abolish  established governmental Ethics Committees?  Or destroy, with a pen stroke, desperate people’s chances for health care?  And so on and so on?  I’ve never thought so.

Yet many people whom I, personally know  profess horror at our current cultural/political state, while simultaneously hiding behind their Pollyannaism?  They’ll march;  they’ll phone and email Congressmen; they read widely; they keep up with news [yeah, the old-fashioned kind still called ‘news’]; and they’re highly educated.  So why, then, do they choose to ‘look the other way’ and insist everything’s basically all right?

  And, possibly even more worrying, why do so many people in power who seemingly don’t agree with the idea of recreating 1930’s Germany here on this side of the Atlantic, suffer from this same deadly sin?
Please:  Email me some answers to this question.  We have lots more, contemporary, ‘sins’ to discuss.