Skip to main content

Once in a While, Even Small Volcanoes Erupt

It is true that we, collectively, as a government, spend too much if you compare that to government income.

A monstrous amount of what we spend is spent on military adventures such as the war in Iraq, which our (then) President and Congress refused to pay for.  They just shifted money around, short-changed our own social needs, and borrowed.  We still spend far too much for military expenditures; about as much as the next eight nations comnbined!

As a consequence, we citizens scorn our Congress for the decisions it has made, fiscally, militarily, and politically.  They deserve scorn, and so do we.  We elected them, and agreed that they should not pay for their adventures, and urged them to look for new places to send in troops.

Our tax system is a disgrace.  Taxes on the wealthy have rarely been so low in memory.  The wealth of our country is running uphill to the most wealthy like a river defying gravity.

The state of our infrastructure--roads, sewers, water supply, power grids, rail travel, educational institutions and quality of education are way down the list of what countries in the rest of the world are doing.  We insist on being the only modern country in the world that does not provide health insurance for everyone, and we insist that providing health insurance should make massive amounts of money for the private companies that provide it, and howl like wolves at every suggestion that it should be a public sector program, like Medicaid, and Social Security.  One of my friends did remodeling work for a man who walked away from his health insurance job with something like a billion dollars.  Not his money:  ours.  

Historically, periods of low taxation have been followed by periods of higher taxation, because even morons eventually figure out that we need schools, and roads, and hospitals, and ports and railroads, and parks, and more health care than emergency rooms can provide.  We need immigrants for their labor and brains and imagination and ideas.  We need to fix the bridges, and get smart about buying medicine.

The dismal state of our own decision-making about whom to elect, and what to ask them to do, and what kind of a country we want to build, gives people like Donald Trump a grand hearing.  Of course we want to be great, again!  Donald Trump does not know what that might be.  He only says he will provide it, and we say, "Sic 'em, Donald!"  And Donald says he has a deal for us, and that he reads the Bible--especially Two Corinthians--and we say he is the real deal.  He is the real dealer.

And that is what is scary!  Not that Donald Trump is the problem, but that we are.  Ignorance and self-imposed wounds are scary.

I almost wanted Hillary Clinton to become President.  Not any more.  She does not have a vision for America.  She has a vision of becoming President.  Bernie Sanders sounds like F.D.R., and we say Bernie is a Socialist--not a Democratic Socialist, such as much of the world affirms it, but a Soviet Union Communist--so we actually listen to Ted Cruz, whose own partners in Congress despise him, and blow our tin trumpets for getting involved in more theological wars between Islamic religious factions.

Jeez, Louise!  Have we gone mad?

Comments

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

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...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...