Skip to main content

The Benefits of Travel

"These," I remember thinking, "are of a different race."

They wore unisex uniforms:  dark blue, white shirts and blouses,
highly polished shoes, even in bad weather, and they talked
together about $30,000. high school tuition, and getting into
an Ivy League school, and about the commute.  They were
officially warm and gracious, and I wondered if they ever farted.

They were of a different race; denizens of  The Beltway.

They made me feel seedy.  A hick with a Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago, somewhere out west.  I had an urge
to talk to Lyle Cary, in his machine shop in Decorah, Iowa.

I am not suggesting that people who work for the government
are awful human beings.  To the contrary!  Most of them,
most of all of us, are genuinely good people, and government
itself is both necessary and generally helpful.

But listen to Eric Cantor, or Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner,
and a lamentable number of other long-term career politicians!
They talk of health care as if it were generally available
to all of us.  They speak of going to the emergency room with
the same ignorance as the first President Bush spoke of
supermarket checkout scanners:  "Isn't that a dandy idea!".

Unemployment isn't people for them:  it is a single-digit statistic.
Our educational system isn't public schools:  it is a $30,000. academy.
Going to work isn't dirt and sweat:  it is the commute.
The Second Amendment isn't gunfire in the street at night:  it is a Right.
The housing problem isn't bank repossession:  it is the neighbor's dog.

"Let's repeal health care!"
"Let us tell people to provide for their own Social Security!"
"If you want fire insurance, buy it from the County!"
"Pack your own gun, and take care of your yourself!"

The Chinese sent people out to the countryside to punish them.
Maybe we should send Senators, and Representatives, and their Aides
out into the countryside to educate them.

There is a different race of people out there in Iowa, and Montana
and Michigan.  They speak the same language, but are trying
to say something different with it.  They have an accent,
so you have to spend time listening.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more