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Who'd of Thunk It?

Not the house:  just an example.
Once upon middle age, I spent a month in Mexico City, to attend a language school.  Not wanting to live in the posh part of the inner city where the school was located, I negotiated a room near the Metro, near Chapultepec Park.  I could walk a few blocks from my tiny room, available to me only at night, because during the day Senor Montenegro used it as an office: a desk, a chair, and a gun for him, and a cot for me.  He took the gun with him when he left at the end of the day.

The large old building had once been grand, with an open-air atrium, with a central fountain.  Large gates opened to the street when Senor Montenegro wanted to park inside the gate.

Large old houses in fine preservation stood side-by-side with more ordinary little houses on the street.  The house I was in housed about eight males who had come to Mexico City to work.  Some of them went home, elsewhere, on weekends.

The rich and the poor lived side-by-side, isolated by privilege and poverty, but not geography.  There were older and newer parts of the city where only the poor remained, or had gathered, and where the rich put gates around the whole neighborhood, but ours was an old accommodation between the rich and the poor.

*   *   *

Today, for the first time that I can recall, we openly conduct politics as a contest between the rich and the poor.  We don't say that:  we talk about "the Middle Class", but we really mean the gloriously rich, and those who think they can attain to that, and the poor, who deplore calling themselves poor, so we speak of "the Middle Class".   Personally, I am middle class, having just sold a house that brought about $90,000. less than we had brought to it.  We sent a check to the closing.  "Oh, yest!", the realtor had assured us.  "About 60% of the people who sell houses bring cash to the closing."

Maybe Mitt Romney had the percentages wrong.  I am one of the 60% who did not vote for him, and whom he had no reason to care for.

Republicans in Congress are openly and fervently refusing to endorse any budget deal that will require the very wealthy to pay more than they do now, and now they pay far less than their fair share.  Rather than nudge the tax rate for the rich up a little, they look for ways to get the money from the people who live in the little houses off to each side.

Is there not something absurd in giving a tax break to allow someone to buy a mansion or two on Lake Minnetonka, and to send him a Social Security check for $1,500. every month while, at the same time, maneuvering to raise the retirement age for the people who are remodeling the house at the Lake, and denying health care to the people who live in the shacks and old roadside inns on the Old Highway?

*   *   *

Politics of Poverty and Privilege!  Right here!  Out loud, in Congress, and on Talk Shows!  Not an accommodation, but a choice:  one or the other.

Who'd of thunk it?  


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