It must be the general darkness and creepiness of the season (as some choose to characterize it, that is), but I am in one foul mood right now. Either that, or the collective weight of the crummy news this week has finally overwhelmed me. I had thought that President Obama's election was a new beginning for America, a revival of the America that the Founders envisioned, an America with a system of government unique in the history of the world. This week, however, I have decided that America's decline is irrevocable, and we are sliding down to an ignominious end.
There are no truer words in the Bible: the love of money is the root of all evil. And the love of money is what has done in America. Our Founding Fathers envisioned a country where merit and objective standards determined our fate, but what we have wound up with is the same thing that has brought down most, if not all, other great experiments in human self-governance: an oligarchy. Only the minute details differ. America is not an oligarchy based on birth. America is not an oligarchy based on intelligence. America has become an oligarchy based on money. To put it less delicately (and as I have noted before): them what has the gold makes the rules. Or even less delicately: the only thing that trickles down to people like me in a trickle-down economy is pee.
The ingredients? Keep as many people as possible out of good housing. Since public school budgets are based on property values, this preserves inequities in the educational system. Moreover, work at dumbing down the public education system and move all the rich kids into private schools. "No Child Left Behind"? Hardly. More like "Every Child Except the Child of Millionaires Left Behind." The educational inequities produce a less skilled workforce, which will work for lower wages and no benefits (especially once you convince them that unions are evil), which can be led around by the nose by propaganda masquerading as news. Truth doesn't matter. Facts do not matter. The only thing that matters is how much money you can throw around to drown out the voices of those who disagree with the desire of the rich to keep those riches for itself.
The only thing that can fight money is more money--and for those who have barely enough to cover their basic expenses every month, it's impossible to contribute (monetarily) to even the most worthy of causes. I admire and respect what True Majority does, but if I have to choose between paying for prescription refills and giving money to True Majority, guess where the money is going? To my prescription refills. As a matter of survival, I literally have no other choice.
Money in politics is as corrosive and corrupting and disruptive as are illegal steroids in sports. Right now, health insurance companies are running an ad designed to frighten our senior citizens into crying out against health care reform, on the grounds that "a government takeover of health care" will result in reduced Medicare benefits to them. I'm not even going to get into the irony that Medicare is itself a government-run program. I'm not even going to get into noting that the allegation that Medicare benefits are going to be reduced is simply untrue.
I am going to note only that the health insurance companies have the money to air these ads around the clock, on every channel, and especially on channels identified [rightly or wrongly--Ed.] as "liberal" outlets. My own reaction, when I first saw that ad running on MSNBC, was where the heck are the MSNBC bigwigs? Why are they allowing this? It's an implicit endorsement of what the ad is saying. And then I thought maybe the powers that be at MSNBC are "taking the money and running." That thought was amusing at first. It also reaffirmed my belief that people who tend to pay attention will get the irony of the ad airing on MSNBC and will see it for what it is, an outright lie. But now that that ad has pummelled me for a week, at all hours of the day and night, I think the true purpose is what has,in fact, happened to me. I am tired and overwhelmed. I no longer have the mental energy to push back. I am suffering from issue fatigue, and, compounded by my illness, I am no longer able to mount anything other than this most feeble protest. In short, I am on the verge of giving up.
About one percent of the people in this country hold well over half the total wealth of this country. And that one percent is not just able, but willing, to spend whatever it takes to drown out the rest of us. I could even live with that if the rest of us were holding our own, but we aren't. Purchasing power and standards of living for the traditional "middle class" in this country have declined, frighteningly so, in the past decade. Yet the überrich are not content to keep what they have. They are intent on amassing ever more of the country's total wealth for themselves. Their focus is their own short-term economic gain. They are trying to undo every single thing that this country has done in the past 150 years that put ANY kind of limit on them at all. And the rest of us can just go hang, as far as they are concerned.
Short-sighted? Yes. Ultimately stupid? Indubitably. It's not unlike the situation from a few decades ago when the loggers in the northwest wanted unrestricted access, to cut down all the old-growth forest, and to hell with the spotted owl. Yes, the loggers and their families would have more work and more money . . . for a while. But when the old growth is gone, it's gone. Forever. Then what? Likewise, once we lose everything and can no longer subsidize the lifestyles of the very rich, what will they do? They don't even think about that. They don't care. Their only concern is to top their previous quarter's record-breaking earnings. Gordon Gekko has won. Even people who don't share in the bounty think that greed is good, for they HOPE to share in that bounty someday. That "that ain't gonna happen" doesn't even occur to them. They've bought into the propaganda. They'd eat their children if they thought it would help them gain the keys to the kingdom.
At times like this, I am glad I am so sick, for I do not want to live through what this trend, continued unabated, inevitably will cause. I weep for the America that could have been. I mourn for the average citizens of the America that is to come. Then again, if the Mayans and the Chinese and Nostradamus and all the other prognosticators are right (according to the History Channel, that is), we're all going to die in 2012, so at least our continued suffering will be short.
