I thought I might work on a couple of longer posts today in and around cooking and watching football. I wasn’t expecting to publish anything.
But sometimes posts write themselves.
Below is an email exchange I’ve had this weekend with a couple of family members (anonymized as Respected Elder #1 and Respected Elder #2). There are about 20 people total on the distribution (mostly other family members and friends of Respected Elders #1 and #2).
I thought “I need to write a post about this.” But nothing I came up with seemed as effective to me as just posting the email. So here it is. (Language warning.)
The first email contained this narrative about Obamacare. Respected Elder #1 added:
Read it and be amazed.
Respected Elder #2 replied all with the following:
What I don’t understand is why liberals and Democrats really want to destroy our country. How can they possibly ignore what socialism has done to people over the last hundred years. The Nazis and Communists killed anywhere from 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 poor souls who were told that “equality” was the noble goal. WTF?
To which I replied:
Power.
The thought goes no further than “if I make people dependent on the government, then I can secure their votes with the slightest whisper of ‘the other side will take this away from you.'”
You’re asking questions that they aren’t even asking themselves. Secure the power, and they get to decide what those next questions are. Get the power; then we’ll figure out what to do with it.
(That’s why Obamacare has proceeded merrily along, despite the demonstrable near-total failure it is. It’s never been (primarily) about helping people. It’s always been about limiting individual liberty. Yeah, it doesn’t work. Yeah, it’s flaky. SIGN UP ANYWAY, CITIZEN. Whatever else you do, GET ‘EM IN THE SYSTEM. We’ll figure out what to do with ’em later.)
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” – O’Brien to Winston, George Orwell’s _Nineteen Eighty-Four_
Respected Elder #1 then said:
What we need to figure out is how to direct our grandchildren to minimize the damage to their lives with the ultimate collapse of the whole fucking mess.
Like you don’t want to be under a bridge when it falls down with the next train….the free shit train to nowhere.
(“The free shit train to nowhere” is art.) Respected Elder #2:
It’s up to our children to turn things around. The greatest generation gave birth to the selfish generation (baby boomers). We have fucked everything up. I’m very sorry about that!
My reply after that, and the last message in the exchange as I type:
I appreciate the sentiment, but there are also plenty of boomers who have understood what’s going on all along and have shouted the warnings from the rooftops.
The list of things I can control is short. I can trust God, because best I can tell, when I ask Him about this He says “yup, trust Me even on this.” I can live prudently and responsibly. I can seek and engage the persuadable (which I suspect is probably the best use of my gifts to try to turn it around).
Beyond that, it’s between hoping for a) a gradual reversal of course resulting from won hearts and minds who then act in our country’s long-term interests; or b) a severe but marginally recoverable systemic failure.
As the latter seems much more likely to me, I just try not to think about it day to day.
We are proceeding to a terrible day of reckoning.
And millions of us are yelling for more throttle.
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Couldn’t have explain it any better. Amen!
I wish a ton of people could read this exchange!
I am so tired of the narrative of poverty that the right sells: Poor people are poor because they are lazy. Because they are promiscuous. Because they are foolish. Because they will not delay gratification. Because they are stupid. If there are handouts, they will take them and scream for more because they are entitled brats who just want to get their way.
And yet. The same conservatives who scream bloody murder about “welfare queens” having children so they can “stay on the dole” are also against providing free/low cost birth control. The same conservatives who believe that poor people are too “lazy” to get a job overlook the fact that getting/staying employed has many hidden requirements–reliable transportation, childcare, good health, enough dental care that your missing teeth aren’t off putting. And the governmental attempts to help these people are not “easy”. They require wading through the paperwork of bureaucracy, often being bounced from office to office.
Is our current system perfect? No. Is the healthcare law worrisome? Yes. But whining about how “they” have it so easy and you who has to WORK, so HARD has it worse, and this mysterious “they”, this “other” is taking it all from you by virtue of their poverty…the attitude is stomach turning.
If the concern is a steep increase in costs, a deep uneasiness at the government being in your doctor’s office (and medical records), a concern about handing over private data to an establishment that has proven it does not care about privacy of it’s citizens…then let’s focus on those. Slamming the poor is little more than an example of the right doing exactly what it’s complaining the left is doing–pandering to it’s base as a way to maintain control. “Those” people are unsavory, unfit, and unlike the strong, upstanding moral citizens on the right.
Our entire political establishment (left and right) is well stocked with people who are hungry for power and control. And keeping us picking at each other over who is more noble, who is more worth compassion, is an excellent way to keep us from turning on them, our fair leaders who exemplify exactly why our side is the “good” side.
Amanda, the point is that an entitlement society will inherently fail. Period, paragraph. The reason it will fail is that it can never give enough. We started down this road with the New Deal. Then, LBJ sprayed a bunch of Super Glue on the back side of the gas pedal and stood on it. By even the most conservative estimates, we have spent several trillion taxpayer dollars in the name of combating poverty.
How’s that working out?
All of the bluster about who’s calling who poor and work ethic and birth control or whatever else is noise, and I would argue it’s that noise that keeps you distracted. We are dealing with a widespread and fundamental failure of understanding what a successful government looks like and does.
Our government should provide us an environment in which we can succeed. It should do this mostly by staying out of our business. When we begin tasking it with providing us—any of us—the success itself, then we’re begging for exactly the grave trouble that’s on the horizon.
I absolutely agree that they are two separate issues. It just puts my teeth on edge how commonly the two are conflated. Big vs Small government is a very different debate than hard workers vs lazy moochers and yet that somehow always becomes the framework for the debate. It drives me up a wall. (And then there’s the fact that neither party actually wants Small government, something that is often conveniently overlooked by the right…)