STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND REPUBLICANS

I keep wondering how a person can complain about congress not doing anything and then vote Republican. Add to this the majority of Republicans, not just a slim majority but an overwhelming majority of members of that political party, who complain about wanting immigration reform, feel the need for gun registration, increasing taxes on the rich, correction of income disparity, funding of infrastructure such as highways, and on and on. Compare this to the majority of all people and the percentage goes even higher. Everyone recognizes a “disconnect” between what congress does and what the people want them to do. Does this somehow compute in their minds as being representative government? How can people say they “would be willing to die fighting for America” and respect the “star spangled banner” and then seem to hate everything “America” stands. For example look at the Republican Party platforms in relations to legislation such as one man one vote (voter suppression), equality among man (gerrymandering districts), and equal economic opportunity for all (blocking minimum wage), moves to destroy public schools (poor districts have poor schools), and student loan legislation designed to prevent working class students from going to college. Add to this the concept that corporations are people when they clearly are not. If this wasn’t so serious it would be laughable. Preposterous or not, that is what happens in the voting booth. Understand why is a challenge.

Obviously, they base their political affiliation on an innate belief or lie that separates them from realities discussed in the first paragraph; it was this belief on my part that has been the basis for many posts on this blog site. However, that does not answer the question of what exactly that belief is. Judging from the response of Radical republicans to my proudly proclaim that I am a liberal, I think it is based on peoples’ fear of being cheated. Talking to a person from a deeply “red” community, meaning the people they have associated with all agree with their position, especially if they have had a few alcoholic drinks. This group apparently never had to defend their position. They will tell you it is because liberals are those dirty, often lazy black people or white trash, drug addicted people who have one objective in life, which is to live off the hard work of conservatives. I have had this happen to me many, many times. It is unexpected but it does happen when even highly educated people are involved. In addition, people who work hard for a living even thought they are working from less than minimum wage firmly hold this belief.

The human tragedy is that up to a point it is true; people who injured themselves while working often are reluctant to return to work after they have “healed”. If a person losses his or her job and receives “unemployment insurance”, they often refuse to look for work until they can no longer collect a check. Add to this the idea of “paid sick days”; people treat this program as adding vacation days. Social security is the same thing; people retire the moment they can regardless of their physical and mental ability to work or not. In each one of these cases, the liberals support “caring for people” and conservatives put emphasis on the human propensity to cheat while the liberals put emphasis on caring for those who legitimately need help. Politicians moderate all of these things by what they called “welfare reform”, which is universally welcomed.

Unfortunately, people need government action to meet welfare needs and satisfaction of these needs require taxes; in other words, liberalism cost money.  We all have an innate greed; evolution has built it in to our being as “survival of the fittest”. No one wants to pay taxes but as our humanization has evolved, we have learned to introduce and accept such things as benevolence and quality of life into our behavior. In a world where only the strong can eat or one animal eats another animal to survive, survival of the fittest is cruel; there is no place for “mister nice guy”. What our Republican among us are saying is that I really do not care if there are children sleeping on cement floors on our Mexican U. S. boarder, in fact I object to even feeding them; old age poverty is not my business, even if they are my parents; and if you lost your job or got hurt while working, that is just too bad. We need the best health care system in the world that taxes can buy but you really do not deserve to benefit if you as an individual cannot pay for it. If you think about it, this is what Republicans mean by individualism; every person is a man onto them selves. However, unlike Ayn Rand, even George W. Bush realized that benevolence counts for something; he didn’t invent the oxymoron but “compassionate conservatives” do exists, it is just that their compassion does not dominate their thinking in a voting booth. If that happened, they would vote for minimum wage, affordable health care, social security, public educations, but also keep an eye on “welfare reform” because they understand human frailties.     

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