THE DAY AFTER
The following is but a short list of what Republican ideology i.e. less taxes and less government regulation caused:
Foreclosures on the rise from coast to coast. Poverty on the rise. Unemployment twice as high as the government tells it citizens. Jobs outsourced, shipped overseas to someone who will be paid less to do the same job and produce a larger profit than last year. Failed educational systems for all who cannot afford a quality education. Supporting the troops – at least until they come home where they comprise an increasing number of people living on the streets. A military-industrial complex budget that exceeds the budgets of all the other nations combined. Threats of doing away with the minimum wage. Claims that unemployment is unconstitutional. Balancing the budget on those who work for a living. A return to trickle on economics. An economic stimulus of tax breaks for the wealthy where the rich get richer and the gap widens between rich and poor. All the attending social problems that follow and the cost if we have not yet lost our humanity. A return to the free market with little or no government regulation that resulted in the near crash our economy and the world’s as well in 2008.
A recent poll claimed that 58 percent of Americans think our economy is going in the wrong direction. When the Republicans claim the House in 2011 is anyone supposed to believe nothing other than as a people we want our country to go back to the good old days where government acted on behalf of the free market casinos on Wall St. at the expense of the American people and then had the unmitigated gall to require the people to pay for a party at the country club to which they weren’t even invited. The banks were bailed out by the Bush Administration, Main St. was given the bill and it was only made possible by the appeasement of the Democratic Party.
My suspicions were confirmed because I woke up on 11/3/10 a sane man in an insane society that rewarded the political party which created our current economic morass and obstructed any meaningful attempts to clean it up were returned to power by enough people who preferred rhetoric to reality and sixty second sound bite slogans to solutions of substance.
During the 2008 presidential campaign Barak Obama claimed that America’s best days are ahead of us and while politicians from both major political parties echoed that same nostalgia for yesterday the reality is that the best days of the American Empire was when we had a strong middle class and those days are far behind us.
How we respond to that reality will determine our future and since enough Americans were convinced that going backward is going forward the results of the midterm elections in 2010 is a strong indication that America remains in a state of a denial that the decay within is spreading.
The consequences of these actions will be evidenced by further economic crisis that will decrease the middle class and widen the gap between rich and poor. By going backward we are creating the very conditions that will provide an opportunity for the best of demagogues to rise in 2012 and impose a tyranny of the few on the many.
It is written that the Buddha once said “do nothing” and while I think I am somewhat aware of the context within which he said “do nothing” in the present moment I’m more aware of me following that sage advise by responding to today’s midterm elections by “doing nothing”.
That’s right. I did not exercise my right to vote because I remembered that to do so would be to recognize the legitimacy of a system designed to maintain the status quo and I willfully withheld my consent to be governed by a government that is bought and paid for by multi-national corporations.
The choice Americans had on 11/2/10 was between a Democratic Party that lacked the courage of their convictions except when turning against their base and the Republican Party, the party of big business that never had any intention of doing what was right for the American public by obstructing any meaningful change to the mess they created.
That a majority of those who bothered to participate in their own oppression by voting out of fear, hatred and ignorance for a political party that caused so much suffering in this country in the past deserves nothing but contempt and disdain especially from those of us who refused to vote once again for the lesser of two evils where the outcome only perpetuates an endless cycle of more suffering or less suffering – better to “do nothing” than participate in a way of life that requires a new way of living.
