I’ve suspected this for a while, but the current spate of federal Republican House voting against hurricane Sandy relief was the straw that broke my particular camel’s back. It began with the lame duck sessions in the Michigan House that in part directly overruled the November vote of the citizenry, rolling back women’s rights, loosening gun laws, and making it super-easy for doctors to refuse treatment to any patient at any time. Then came the blocking of hurricane relief, and since then it’s even continued in their stonewalling of the UN Disabilities treaty. The weight of all this has finally ignited my understanding that this is not just a matter of ideological differences. This is full-on perversion of the American way of doing things. In their apparent belief that they can do this and face no consequences, I sincerely hope that they are wrong.
But let me also say this... up until now, I thought that these people -- the right-wing, rich/elitist, racist/paranoids that have all banded together in the GOP -- were a small minority. I thought they were just the loudest voices, shouting into television cameras, and getting most of the attention because of it. But this news I'm seeing now is bringing up another question in my mind... where is the Republican opposition to this minority, if it is one? Where are the many sensible conservatives standing up and saying, "These people do not represent what being a Republican is all about!" If the people who want to say this actually exist, what are they so afraid of that they won't speak out? I’ve heard a few isolated Republican voices to this effect, but why are the rest of these people standing by, if they don’t actually believe the anti-democratic junk they’re peddling? It must be because they’re afraid to, too afraid to go against the lobbyist and huge corporations who fund them.
The basis for this corruption must have originally come from greed. Greed for money, greed for power, greed for influence, greed for dominance of some corner of the world. This is why we live in a country where we're even *debating* whether corporations should have more rights than individuals. This is why we live in a country where a 24-hour “news” channel is consciously allowed to run as an entertainment business, telling a certain segment of the population exactly what they want to hear. Over time, greed has begotten greed… the further the upper echelons of society retreat, dragging their wealth and power behind them, the more people have no choice but to ask themselves, “Never mind about everyone else, how can I look out for me and mine?” You end up with two people who support the Republicans… both the rich and poor desperately trying to protect what they have, and to not fall into the growing gap in between.
This goes beyond just greed, I'm afraid. Because greed, taken in large enough doses for long enough, turns into actual fear and contempt. Take Papa John's, for example. Their CEO publicly announced that he supports a business model that makes it harder for people to earn a living, so that the company can make bigger profits. On paper, that makes sense. Big company, gotta make big profits. Not only that, but they have to be bigger than last year, every year, ad infinitum (which is mathematically impossible to do, but let's save that for another time). He said that he was going to have to start charging customers higher prices in order to pay for their employees' healthcare. Now, for the moment, let's also ignore the fact that the current President's re-election changed absolutely nothing in the way the country's healthcare system is run. Let's just ask ourselves... would customers be willing to pay a little more, if it meant that the chain's employees could keep working full shifts and actually have healthcare? I have to believe that yes, it would.
How do I know this? Because it's a vicious circle. People will pay a little bit more for things if they actually *have* a little bit more money and don’t have to watch what they spend so closely. And how will they get a little more money? If they have stable jobs that pay a little better, pay them for a full day's work, and give them the peace of mind that only health care can provide. Our economy has been caught up in this sort of anti-bubble where the mandate of keeping costs down (for fear of losing sales) has led to companies cutting every corner, until there's nothing left to cut but wages and hours. We can break that cycle if we want to, but the highest-paid members of these organizations are going to have to realize that their golden parachutes, yearly bonuses and tax shelters are going to have to take a hit, just like the rest of us have taken a hit and appropriately downsized our lives in the last five years. No one should be exempted from this.
Above and beyond this, the thing that pisses me off even more is that this makes me sound just like all the conspiracy-theorist lunkheads that I've been so quick to laugh off in the past. Do I now think all those people were right? No, of course not. Because they were misled, strung along down some kind of path where what they wanted to be true became what they actually believed. But even as I state this, I'm keenly aware that THIS IS EXACTLY SOMEONE WHO IS AS CRAZY AS THEY ARE WOULD SAY. That's the only reason I've been afraid to say it out loud.
And that leads me back to the Republicans, which I can now see are a bastion for people who want to Keep Things The Way They Were, which obviously is impossible, and was a skewed view of the world in the first place. The world never was they way they thought it was, full of picket fences, safe neighborhoods and good-ol’ American values. It was a time of unrepeatable post-war boom, full of injustice and segregation of minorities of all kinds. But the illusion had been built up so strongly to the aging benefactors of that era (read: rich white men) that it seemed like it was real. These are the men that have now effectively bought the Republican soul.
I have a world of nostalgia, too. And I realize its shortcomings. I went to an elementary school that was desegregated, but didn’t admit its first black student until I was attending there in the late 70s. I heard gay people and “retards” being openly made the butt of jokes in my high school. Looking back at it now, it feels like the Dark Ages. Not for one second would I trade it for the world I live in today. Wouldn’t life be sad if we only maintained the status quo, remained frozen in place? Would you ever want to look back over the past ten or twenty years and *not* marvel at how far we’ve come? Well, the time to wake up has come, Republicans. Come and live in the world that the rest of us have been building and trying to maintain while you holed up in your mansions watching Fox News. There’s room for us all, but we’ve got to learn to share.
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