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.
URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated
No comments:
Post a Comment