The Enemy Of The People

Someone just told me that America's in trouble because too many of us are blinded by our mindless hatred of the president. One would assume he was referring to the fist-bumping, angry, terrorist-loving, fraudulent Muslim president who was born in Africa, but no. Whole different president. Seems like someone has set people like me up as a straw man. After all, there's no need to listen to a mindless hater.

Except that doesn't describe me or my friends. America's in big trouble, but not because of us.

This president? I don't hate him. I do think he's a loathsome, contemptible, ignorant, ill-bred, dangerous, pathetically insecure con man, circus barker, and bullshit artist, but I am a forgiving sort, and do not demand purity from my politicians, and if he did anything laudatory I would acknowledge it. But he hasn't. Across the board, in every sphere, at every level, he is making everything worse. Catastrophically worse. That, I hate.

He's the sort who might be expected to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement by piously claiming that all lives matter--except for all the people whose lives don't matter to him at all, including our fellow citizens, other nations, tribes, faiths, and his own political opponents. We are being deliberately sliced into factions, for no purpose but to divide us and politically conquer us, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

We might wish that every Republican who rails against abortion would light up like a bulb if he has personally paid for an abortion. But let us just stipulate that for every one of them who honestly believes in the rights of embryos, there are dozens more who don't care at all, but are willing to use that lever to pry a reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And somewhere there might be a Republican who suspects that gun rights have gone too far, but he is willing to let that go in order to pry off another reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And you know what? I care about reproductive rights, and I worry about gun violence. But I would cede it all, and send women back to the coat hanger, and give every man, woman, and fetus a gun, if it meant the modern Republican party would wither and die. Because we're in a heap of trouble, and we're out of time.

It was forty years ago I was first startled to read that carbon might be our most dangerous pollutant. And now we are looking at the extinction of half the world's species in the next eighty years; we're on track to a collapse of all the world's fisheries in thirty; half our coral is dead now; we're running out of fresh water;  our ecosystems are collapsing; and those sounding the alarm are being dismissed as fearmongers and frauds. And a population easily gulled and lulled believes it. We grew up in the oil age with no sense of how special it is, how extraordinary our energy-enhanced abilities are, how unsustainable this existence is. We're a species that has muddled along for a million years and then, pretty much in my own puny lifetime, shot about sixty million years'-worth of buried carbon into the air, and that means that yes, unfortunately, as incredible as it seems, we really are living in the end times. We made them ourselves.

And the time to do something about it was at least thirty years ago, and plenty of people knew it. But the past is not retrievable, and the best we can do is start now. Instead, thanks to the feckless and ignorant occupant of the presidency, and his cynical enablers in the Republican Party, we're all in Thelma and Louise's car with the pedal to the metal. We know what must be done. We have no time left for ignorance. Or dupes. Or mercenaries. Or greed. Or any member of the one party whose only core belief is that--for them and their friends--there is no such thing as too much money.

Ecclesiastes 5:10

An editor in our local rag put in a nice Thanksgiving piece saying how grateful she is to rich people for paying all our taxes for us. Most of us don't contribute much at all, says she, and it is the very wealthy who are supplying the bulk of our revenue. (Thank you, rich people, and please accept our outsized contribution of sacrificial humans for the war machine you make money on.)

It never occurs to her to think there's anything wrong with the fact that a slim sliver of the population has so goddamn much money that they can pretty much fund the government they're trying to shrink, or the interest on the swelling national debt, and yet they're still rich. But there is something wrong here. It's unconscionable. It's immoral. You can take the Pope's word on that, or Jesus's, even though only one of them is a Christian.

There are a few ways to get filthy rich, but they don't track real well with merit. Some of the folks who got hold of a good idea and had decent entrepreneurial skills managed to accumulate a lot of money, and they are busy trying to give it away as fast as they can, which is what any mentally healthy person with too much money would do. Others are just buying warehouses to stash their money in and giving away only so much as it takes to buy off Congress and get them even more money. These people don't need more money. They need therapy.

Most of the truly wealthy have stolen it. You don't need a gun. We're all stealing. When we consume palm oil, which is in everything, we steal land and livelihood from indigenous peoples. We steal our children's future by dumping carbon from deforestation into our atmosphere. We're able to buy stuff cheap because our slave class is in another country. We murder people in the Congo to acquire the minerals for our cell phones. Everything has a cost, even if we prefer to ignore it.

The rich people's money is not theirs. It's stolen too. We used to have living-wage jobs in this country. We used to have pensions. We were doing all right. Then came the campaign to eviscerate the labor unions. Wages stagnated or tumbled and the increased profits that resulted went to the investor class. Our plodding but reliable pensions gave way to the "ownership society." We could do so much better on our own if we just hand over our reduced wages to the financial sector. Only we didn't do better. We gambled it on a game we didn't understand and someone else got the big pot. And it's gone. It's stolen. It trickled straight uphill and we won't see it again. And if anyone truly believed this concentrated wealth was earned or deserved, there would be no talk of repealing the estate tax.

Did you hear Senator Chuck Grassley (age 134, plus or minus fifty years) the other day? He was asked why we should reward the already-wealthy by repealing the estate tax. Why, says he, that's to show a little appreciation to the people who sweated and saved their pennies and invested and contributed to society. Senator Grassley says the rest of us working stiffs spent our money on booze and women and movies.

Booze, and women, and movies.

Oh, Senator Grassley, I do declare! Thank you for standing up for all us little ladies at home in our calico frocks who would be in the catbird seat right now if our worthless husbands wasn't squandering our butter money on booze and broads. Please go right after our Medicare next so the sons of bitches will realize whut they done and mend their ways! But Senator, suh? We do love us some movin' pitchers and a little sarsaparilla now and then. Is that so bad?

Seriously, little senator dude? If you believe a wealthy man--let's assume it's a man, since you do--should be rewarded for his thrift and foresight and hard work, over and above the reward of his own wealth, whyever would you want to dump a ton of money on his kids' heads? Let them scrimp and save, if that's what you truly admire. Let us all start out equal. Heh heh. Just kidding. We ain't at the same starting line. We ain't even in the same race.