We need to bring the light

December 21, 2014 a world of progress, letters, media, progressive living, progressive media center No comments

cop shot

The two cops who were brutally murdered this week in New York City are just the latest victims in what is starting to look like a civil war among ourselves.

They are as much victims of this mess as are the African-Americans murdered by white police officers.

The real perpetrators are the gun manufacturers and the rest of the war machine. They’re getting filthy rich off the arming of America’s citizenry and the militarization of our police forces.

Fox News whips up fear among those who watch and believe, and while we the people are distracted, the 1 percent pick our pockets by convincing us they need more. It’s never enough. When you have that much the greed becomes pathological.

It doesn’t matter how many of us die, just so long as there are enough people to labor on their machines, fight their wars and tend to their desires.

I know this is radical thinking, but it becomes increasingly obvious that we, the working class, are losing.

People are so distracted by threats of terrorism and Ebola that they don’t see their rights being plucked away, bit by bit. “Oh, sure, demanding an ID before someone can vote isn’t a bad idea,” you might think. Then they convince you people who can’t pass a literacy test shouldn’t have a say in electing a government.

Young, unarmed African-American men, even boys, are shot down in the street, choked, attacked, beaten, frisked for no reason, and too many of us listen to those who call them thugs and say they deserve to die.

Poor people live on the streets, many of them in need of treatment for psychiatric illness or addiction, and we listen to the people who call them bums and try to run them off by passing laws criminalizing giving them food.

The War Machine wants us to be scared enough to follow the call to war anywhere, any time. We say “no more boots on the ground,” but then we always seem to cheer on our troops when we become convinced we need boots on the ground.

When we have sent these men and women into combat five, six, eight times and they have become too debilitated to be of any further use to the machine, we discard them.

So much for honoring the troops, although we still are called to glorify the military, to say thanks to a soldier as we vote for the people who will strip away more of their benefits.

After World War II, we prosecuted Germans and Japanese for doing exactly what we did to people under the guise of fighting terrorism, and more than 50 percent of Americans think that’s OK.

We’re the frog put into a pot of cool water and heated ever so slowly until we’re poached. We don’t see it coming until it’s too late, and it’s getting damn close to too late.

What we’re seeing right now is only the beginning, and unless we see substantial wage increases, fewer tax breaks for the super-rich, a cease of the attack on women’s and workers’ rights, and improvements to the things we need and use every day — our nation’s infrastructure — we’re cooked.

I’m not sure what the path would be to combat the increased violence, and the increased tolerance of it. I guess we each have to stand up for what we believe is right. We have to reject the violence and hatred. We have to be constructive and not destructive.

I guess what I’m saying, is that in this season of darkness, we have to bring the light.

Blessed be, as my Pagan friends say. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas.

 

He’s not interested in people who need help

September 18, 2012 a world of progress, letters, progressive living 2 comments

 

Mitt Romney isn’t going for the votes of people who need help paying their bills, buying food, getting health care or keeping a roof over their heads in the face of falling wages and high unemployment.

Mitt cares only about the wealthy who are hoarding America’s financial resources and contributing to the needs of the rest of us rather than helping to solve the problem.

That 47 percent of America that pays no income taxes still pays sales taxes, gasoline taxes, school taxes and more. And the reason they don’t pay income taxes is because their wages are being held artificially low.

The 1 percent has gotten wealthier and wealthier, and none of what they’re hoarding is trickling down to help that 47 percent who can’t even meet their most basic needs without help.

Should such things as health care, nutritious food and a roof over one’s head be considered basic human rights? Well, here’s where I differ with Mitt and his cronies — I believe these things should be seen as rights.

There is enough to go around. In fact, there’s plenty for everyone; it’s just that the 1 percent won’t be satisfied until the rest of us are their indentured servants.

Somehow, the oligarchs have convinced millions of Americans to vote against their own best interests. Just look at the map. You’ll notice that the places that pay the least taxes are also the places where the schools are the worst and critical-thinking skills the lowest.

Thirty years ago, the salaries and bonuses CEOs are paying themselves today would have been unconscionable. There was a moral aversion to such theft and greed. Somehow, though, they’ve convinced Americans that they’re worth it, even though they led us to the brink of worldwide financial disaster.

Mitt’s lack of compassion for fellow human beings is appalling. The people I work with, most of whom can’t work because of illness or disability, are deserving of the dignity of having their needs met. Perhaps Mitt and cronies believe people who can’t “contribute” should be put to death. I suppose that would leave more money for them.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz details the economic inequality in our country in his latest book, The Price of Inequality. And while conservatives think the economists on the Right who espouse “trickle-down” economics know what they’re talking about, I’ll go with the Nobel Prize winner.

I’d say he knows more than I do, and apparently, a whole lot more than Mitt Romney and his advisors.

 

Happy Labor Day, courtesy of American workers

September 3, 2012 a world of progress, letters, progressive living No comments

This could have been my grandmother and her sister near the turn of the 20th century in a Rhose Island textile mill.

My great-grandparents came to this country in the mid-1800s, escaping the great Hunger in Ireland. They were luckier than many; they lived to get on a ship and get here.

My grandparents, born into poverty in the 1880s, never finished elementary school. My grandmother taught herself to read and write and later taught my grandfather. They left school in second grade to go to work because their families needed their income to survive.

As children, they worked in the textile mills of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The noise of the machines cost them their hearing — both needed hearing aids by the time they were in middle age. They worked seven days a week, 12-hour days.

Mill owners loved having children as employees because they were paid less, and their little hands could reach into the machinery and untangle threads caught up in the works. It didn’t matter that children’s hands were mangled — or even that children died. There were always more to replace the ones who were lost.

My in-laws landed in Pennsylvania when they came to this country from Eastern Europe and they worked the coal mines. My father-in-law lost the tip of his finger in an accident and was sent back to work that same day with the finger bandaged. The men of these northeastern Pennsylvania coal towns didn’t live long. They died in mining accidents and from black lung disease, and their employers didn’t care because there were always more to replace the ones who died.

These horrible working conditions happened just a generation or two before me. I remember the stories from my grandparents. My grandmother couldn’t even vote as a young woman, so she had no power to change things other than to hope the men in her life would vote for people who would make conditions better.

Most of us alive today have no direct connection to those times, and the 1 percent are counting on that as they try to abolish all the gains made by our grandparents, many of whom died in the fight for fair labor laws.

We stand at a crossroads in this election year. We can vote to reaffirm those laws, or we can vote for people who wish to do away with minimum wage laws and crush the few unions that are left.

I plan to vote for the rights of workers to make a living wage and to have the protections my grandparents fought so hard to gain for me.

Enjoy your holiday and remember how it came to be. Remember that our forebears lived in mill towns and were paid in company scrip that couldn’t be spent anywhere but at the company store, where prices were just high enough to keep you in debt and unable to leave.

Remember that people could be fired — or killed — for trying to organize for safer and more humane working conditions.

Our ancestors went through hell to make a better world for us. Let’s not hand it back to the 1 percent.