I'm not the captain of this ship...

...so there's no reason I should have to go down with it if McCain and Palin get elected. I'm evidently not the only person who feels this way.

From a link on admnaismith's journal.

Here is a link, and here's some of the text:

The bar was set so low for Sarah Palin's speech that she could have taken two giant dumps on the podium and been praised for not taking a third. She read the words on the teleprompter – written by George W. Bush's speechwriter – with gusto, but offered nothing but tacky denigrations of Barack Obama's character, along with a litany of complete and utter falsehoods.

(snip) 

In a way, tonight was calming. Because truly, if McCain/Palin wins an election over Obama/Biden, this country is so fucked as to warrant abandonment. If this guttersniping, lying marionette and her twisted, ghoulishly-grinning mentor are the people America wants, then the debate is over, les jeux sont faits, we know not to care anymore.

(snip)

I tell you, that's fine. Us elitists, you know, the ones with education, the ones that took an active interest in the world around us, the ones that flourished in the many-hued world of nuance and occasionally tried to make the world a better place - rather than hoarding as much as we could for ourselves and putting barbed wire and guns around it - We will opt out.

We might go to our own version of Coastopia, we might take our talents to another country. There will be a brain drain, the best and brightest fleeing to another place that doesn't make them sick to their stomach.

To be fair, it's begun already. America used to be the land where science advanced, and fifty years ago (or even about twenty years ago) the Hadron Collider would have been built here. Now it's in Switzerland, and whatever technology advances scientists make as a result of greater knowledge will create jobs on another continent.

And Americans don't even see it happening. They're too busy causing recurrances of preventable diseases, because they don't want to vaccinate their kids, killing not only themselves, but immunocompromised individuals depending on herd immunity. They're too busy keeping scientific knowledge about the advancement of life out of our schools because they don't want their kids learning theologically inappropriate truths. They're too busy preventing young people from learning to make responsible choices because they're far more afraid of free will than the Lord God who allowed Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and become more like him than less.

They're too busy turning our reputation for producing scientists into a reputation for producing xenophobic fanatical anti-intellectuals to realize that it is to our detriment to be xenophobic fanatical anti-intellectuals. They won't know until it's too late, and it's possible they won't even see it then.

And there's nothing I can do. There can be no dialogue here. There are a lot of people out there with nothing better to say than, "I hate intellectuals and I can't trust them and neither should you. Trust me instead, because I have no evident credentials and that makes me more credible."

I have a degree in a social science, which means neither of us can listen to the other without sanity loss. I don't know what to do but wave it away and walk off shaking my head.