The GOP tells its impoverished base of racist fools that the Democrats are to blame and they just want to take money (implying "your" money, but really meaning "our money....as in the GOP leaders themselves and more to the point their paymasters) and give it to "them" - the unavoidable subtext being the other...be they Black, Hispanic, Gay, or anything else.
Yet, where are the party leaders denouncing this kind of claptrap nonsense? Why is Paul Ryan not being run out of politics for his own 2010's version of Jimmy "The Greek"? The electoral map, the language, the fake issues used to dissuade the people...its all still fighting the goddamn Civil War and its pointless beyond belief.
Equality is not some abstract concept that Democrats should allow the right to demonize and turn into coded language for "them".
Equality starts with the Rule of Law...something President Obama swore to us he would uphold and fight for, something that made me BELIEVE in him as the answer to our enormous problems at the end of the Bush Error...until it came time to crack down on whistle blowers instead of protect them (as promised), which is laughable now...or until it came down to really fighting to close Gitmo, which unless I am hallucinating is STILL there some 6 years AFTER the election and 5+ years after the orders where to close it down....or when it came to the banksters bailout and total lack of meaningful change, regulation or jail time for the ring leaders. It all simply mocks the concept of "law". I have no interest in participating in the legal system of this country as long as the rich have one standard and the poor a different and far more punitive one. To me, the rule of law is everything to maintaining a just and orderly society and we have allowed the Democratic Party's president to completely ignore this to our eternal and earned shame.
Equality extends to education and the RIGHT, not the privilege or the honor or the gift, but the RIGHT to have a fair chance on a level playing field...it should be the RIGHT of EVERY American citizen to go to college and obtain a 4-year degree without going into wage slavery or bankruptcy to do so. It should be the absolute RIGHT of every child in America to get quality pre-kindergarten education, to START life without being thrown under the bus, but rather escorted onto it.
Equality must also be extended to opportunity. It is the absolute bare minimum to believe that a hard working American citizen, who shows up for work daily and does the right things to care for themself or their family is compensated enough to actually LIVE. We fought one Civil War over the issue of slavery already; and while we have not gotten all the way back to forced labor or the horrors of slavery in principle or practice, we are condemning generations of Americans - past, present and future - to a reality of fewer and fewer choices and less and less of the fruit of their labor. The balance between Capital and Labor has become a joke, with Labor being on the wrong end of the teeter-totter and held a loft at the whim and service of Capital with no voice or means to fight back.
Finally, Equality means that being sick or needing medical care is not something that should be enriching the few at the expense of the many and the pain of the patient. Medical insurance is an evil that must be purged from our midst. The placing of a middle man in between patients and caregivers is unconscionable and the amount of money they extract from us all is obscene. Healthcare is a RIGHT, nothing else, and it is as fundamental as LIFE, LIBERTY OR THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. We should treat it as such already and stop allowing the drug makers and insurers to write the rules. President Obama gets credit from me for moving the ball forward in this issue - at enormous political cost to himself and his legislative agenda - but the credit is for starting the transition to single payer, rights-based healthcare...you can't be player of the game because you got a single in the first inning or advanced the runners into scoring position...you have to DO SOMETHING MORE to earn that, and here we are not making the grade again.
Equality is the ideal, the thing that should draw us together in common pursuit and common purpose - by the very definition of the word, it does NOT mean taking from "YOU" to give to "THEM", it means making reality so that "WE, the people" (as our TEA Party inebriated fellow citizens are wont to say) are working towards a more perfect union. We must know in our hearts that we can never get there, but we must also commit to never stop trying.
(President Obama DOES deserve credit for making Sexual Identity Rights more equal and also for ending wars he inherited while assiduously avoiding new ones in their place. He is not a failed President or an embarrassment to the movement or the compromised Party, he's just disappointing in the fact that so much more seemed possible in 2008 and early 2009 than what we have finished or even attempted in the interregnum between the passage of the ACA and the next Presidential Race that is ALREADY stealing the headlines and making his second term nearly 100% lameduck before it ever accomplishes ANYTHING...)
= new reply since forum marked as read
