Even Better

I've been a professional in the field of education for the last thirteen years. As a result, I've become an expert on adolescent development. Over the years, my skills have been honed to understand how the teenage mind thinks and what are the best practices for engagement and enduring understandings.

Adolescents's first instinct is to rebel. They want to create their own identity that is distinct from their parents. Often times, this rebellion is emotional, irrational and mildly nihilistic. If they can't have their way, they want the whole house torn down. Another key aspect of the teenager is that they can be intellectually lazy and often rely very heavily on the works of others to make their point. This is especially true today in the age of social media and retweets.

With all of this in mind, I was not surprised at all to Kevin Baker's response to my call for an explanation of his support of a candidate who openly wants to make our country submit to the will of Vladimir Putin. Nor am I surprised at his commenters support for such a policy as well. After all, your average teenager like to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Kevin begins by claiming that he will not respond with an uberpost but does so anyway. Of course, it's nothing original from him...just one large cut and paste job of others expressing his emotions for him. In fact, they are mostly photos that demonstrate Hillary Clinton's bizarre ability to turn grown men into catty bitches bent on a "TMZ" like analysis of her. Maybe it's a mommy thing which would fit in nicely with the whole adolescent rage dealio.

Regardless, the Hilz really gets under the skin of right wing bloggers and commenters. They would rather suffer an outright fascist than admit that a Democrat...a female Democrat...would have power over them. They would rather chuck a core ideological tenet (commies are bad) then admit that Hillary Clinton would be a better president in terms of national security and free trade (another core tenet out the window as well)

I will say that I did enjoy some of the memes in the photos insofar as they clearly illustrated the evolutionary line from short wave radio broadcasts to email forwards to blogging to social media. In fact, the entire post (and the comments) also reminded me of the respondents in this video...


So, we had one long apology, fueled by adolescent behavior, for why Trump is the better candidate. I wish they would just admit that they love him. His performance in the debate last night reminded me a great deal of Kevin and his merry band of commenters. His points were filled with bullying and bluster and were largely incoherent. He couldn't sit still and seemed to lose his attention constantly. He had zero specifics on policy and relied largely on logical fallacies in his answers. In short, everything was driven by emotion.

Watching him go on last night, it became abundantly clear that, like a teenager, Trump and the people that will vote for him, just want to tear it all down. They are filled with anger, hate and fear, steadfastly refusing to accept reality. They can't bide the success of people that are far more intelligent and accomplished than they are. A sentence like this....Barack Obama was a great president with constructive policies that saved our country....ignites cognitive dissonance and sends them into a fit. Here's one that will make them feel even more like they are being physically attacked.

Hillary Clinton will be even better.