I am less puzzled perhaps that many Americans search for their motivation to vote, than that so few become disabused of the propaganda they ingest on a continuous basis advocating policies that at best degrade their existence or at worst imperil it, to the point of revulsion or revolt.

In fairness to today’s Republican elected officials, they are surprisingly flexible, and utterly accommodating when it comes to choosing the method of goosing your departure from the mortal coil that is right for you.

I would not be either so glib or so hyperbolic as to suggest their mantra has become “Death to America’” recognizing that the meal ticket the country remains for them, and for their beneficiaries, is much too rich a one to contemplate total annihilation. However they retain a vigor and an innovativeness in pursuit of increasing the incidence of individual mortality that the fair-minded must admit is still impressive.

Your choices for a politically instigated death begin with the most obvious, least subtle method available: victimization by any of America’s incomparable glut of firearms, perhaps in a blaze of cable-covered mass shooting glory. The ease of availability of NRA-Republican provided transportation to Elysium’s paradise only will grow with the proliferation of anti-government fulmination leading to violent confrontations with police and terrorist killing sprees. Indeed, death from ordinary gun-related homicide, or at the hands of the non-partisan deranged, soon may become passé.

Eluding America’s perpetual hail of bullets though makes you the perfect candidate for death from the looming consequences of climate change, which is the ideal choice for procrastinators. Whether incinerated by proliferating wildfires or swept away by a super storm or simply withered away in the wake of the drought destroying your livelihood, if you’re patient your day of reckoning will come. The stubbornness of Republican ideological denialism is one of the few things in life you can count upon, and you’ll never be forgotten by the merchants of preventable death.

Poverty, you’ll be cheered to learn, is your ace in the hole when it comes to advancing in the line to The Sweet Hereafter. Undernourishment and malnutrition are the gifts that will keep on giving for exponents of “don’t help the bums” theories of aid to the poor. Antagonism to effective means of surcease and future opportunity that only government can sufficiently provide is only one of the ways representatives of the “producers” nullify your looting and mooching and weed you out of the gene pool.

The 47% are a burden that is better disposed of, and Republicans back their convictions up with ample means of eradication. Who’ll be washing the cars, teaching the students, serving the food or putting the fires out when the process has been completed remains an open question.

However, there are methods of extermination nicely tailored for everyone. Refusal of the expansion of Medicaid comes as close to actually signing the death certificate for no small number of uninsured Americans as is humanly possible short of coming to the morgue and putting a pen to paper.

If you believe failure by states to expand Medicaid, or the prospective dismantling of Obamacare aren’t literally deadly, whether your excuse is ignorance, ideological intoxication or insularity you are quite mistaken.

I could aggregate the stories for you of those who would be in mortal peril were it not for Obamacare, as well as tales of the needlessly departed due to America’s ineffective health insurance system prior to it, or the bankruptcies avoided post-Obamacare, and those endured in great prostration during the golden age preceding it. But evidence doesn’t sway the indoctrinated and corporeal reality is as easily ignored as turning the channel.

You may conclude these threats do not reach the level of compelling political pressure to vote, or better to unleash political hell. I don’t require convincing by any means of the serenity afforded by blocking out the political mayhem in favor of that which is of greater interest, and even sublimity, and infinitely more susceptible to one’s control. I rationalize, therefore I am.

Nothing can be done for those who genuinely believe climate scientists are in it for the money and scientists lie, while petroleum interests and their Republican factotums always level with you, other than to save their sorry asses with your own.

But I still wonder, still marvel in fact each and every day at the broad complacency in the face of manifestly dangerous extremity, an ideological alternate reality set in concrete and fiercely determined to conquer, whose triumph is an actual possibility and half complete already, resisted only by an equal determination to prevail and to decimate (before it’s too late, one would have to add). This is where the “even-handedness” intellectual poise and self-perceived sophistication of liberalism still grievously fails us all.

Many ordinary citizens, Democrats, media professionals and others who should know better remain, with a certain 20th Century historical resonance, cynically or insouciantly unaffected or falsely secure in the presence of not inconspicuous menacing, lambs retaining an attractive equipoise until their throats are cut.

Or perhaps, it’s simply a case of crying Wolf Blitzer?