mqbush
mqbush's JournalOccupy...
When Bernie Sanders says “Enough is enough!” the deep response from so many people could be, in part, reflective of their experiences with other people for the past several years.
Take me, for instance, and my wife. We were inundated daily with very in-your-face right-wing political/ideological screeds from every acquaintance and family member, for years and years, and we tolerated it, the way civilized people do. We were tacitly insulted and belittled, even in our own home, by the rudest of ideologues, and we didn’t say anything in return. The right’s replacement of the word “civility” with the phrase “political correctness” is an effort to remove shaming as society’s means of controlling the belligerent rudeness of these ideologues.
Then came the announcement that Bernie Sanders is running for president, actually in the race, for real. This had the curious effect of snapping us out of our passive inertness. We started answering back. A few measured responses, polite but committed, and the strangest thing happened. People unfriended us, my brother actually took down his Facebook page, almost every initiating post was deleted so that our comments disappeared as well so that no one else could read them, Facebook pages were cleaned of every political post so there was nothing left that we could critique.
Wow! Did you realize how much power you and I have, to change the ideological landscape of America? Let’s OCCUPY FACEBOOK!
What do you say,-share?
Why the right loves charity and hates taxes
(No, not because one is voluntary and the other compulsory. No one loves compulsory this and compulsory that more than a conservative.)
"Let those who want more taxes just pay more, and leave the rest of us alone," the conservative said. So I said:
The thing about public investments in education, infrastructure, and the like, is that ALL of the public gets to use these benefits. Would the anti-tax crowd be scrupulous about not using the benefits they didn't pay for, anymore than the people who are too poor to pay taxes? No, those who refused to chip in would feel entitled to be on the public dole,-be protected by police they didn't help subsidize, drive on public roads they didn't help pay for, benefit from public-funded research and services they refused to support and which they spat upon as waste when other people (read: unworthy people?) used them. How, I ask you, can those unfortunate enough to be so poor they can't contribute to the public good be any worse than- or, really, anywhere near as bad as- those who can pay, but refuse to?
The concept of the members of a society sharing the costs of its civilization implies equality in the rights and inherent worth of this society's members, regardless of what choices they make, what income they claim, what pedigree/political affiliation/moral inventory they have. The conservative's ethos of charity over universal taxation sets it up that his aid is generous, beneficent, and undeserved, and the recipient is undeserving and insufficiently grateful. The donor can see himself as rightfully dominant over the helpless and passive recipient,-his pet, as it were.
Tax-supported civilization, on the other hand, by educating the poor as well as the rich, assuring rights and protections for the poor as well as the rich, blurs the distinctions of social rank. Those blessed by greater wealth or shrewdness or skill or ambition are then deprived of the additional and unnecessary luxury of lording over the clumsy and the ill-raised.
Some people will always prosper over others, but they don't need to set up an anti-universal-taxation/pro-condescending-charity ethos to exacerbate the inequality and increase their advantage still more. They don't need to use their status and money to undercut the already-struggling, assuring they will be even more poorly prepared; that would be just plain cruel.
The poorer the poor get, the more resentful, suspicious, and hostile the prosperous become toward them. The wider the disparity between rich and poor, the more resentful ("envious!" according to the right) the poor become. More equal cultures experience much less resentment, much less distrust, much less class hostility and breakdown of social cohesion (Wilson and Pickett, THE SPIRIT LEVEL). The right's antipathy to universal compulsory taxation for broad public benefit is as short-sighted as their pirate version of capitalism.
Hippie Paul
The “Do your own thing” catch phrase of the 1960s identified the supposed leftist radicalism of the time as actually a primarily libertarian, not a communitarian, movement. The beating the commons has taken can be laid at the feet of these supposed leftists.
The establishment of a culture of personal identity, and the insistence that this identity had claims on political action, did two things: it undid the eternal belief that what was good for the group was good for the individual, and it undid any lingering belief in any value in social democratic authority; if the good of the group no longer mattered, an overseer of the commons was no longer needed or desirable.
Conservatism still contains a kernel of the old idea of authority, but achieves it through a problematic means,-religion. Man cannot work for mankind, in this view. Old writings taken entirely on faith as the word of God are read like tea leaves to tell us what to do in every aspect of our lives. Those readings have strayed from the pre-monotheistic Golden Rule of communal social good, to what seeks a ranked society of increasingly atomized individuals under strong, off-Earth and unaccountable authoritarian control, as revealed to us by elites.
Individualism was supposed to bring autonomy, but instead only atomizes society, rendering these isolated individuals more dependent on the authority for guidance, for opportunity, for crony contacts.
Morality ceases to be a general societal guide and becomes a score-keeping competition for personal advancement. More categories of activity are added to the personal advancement game: “hard” work (usually involving a $4,000 leather chair, soft manicured hands, a suit and tie, and ruthless sociopathy); “convictions” (often unworthy biases elevated to the same kind of absolute faith that religion requires); and “standards”, or an insistence on anything that was given up long ago as unworkable or inappropriate. Whatever the activity that becomes a rationale for personal, unshared benefit over others, it achieves this status through this tea-leaf reading of untouchable authority, translations done by the high priests of Wall Street and K Street for the benefit of said high priests and favored acolytes.
Leftist authority is damned and ineffective, and rightist authority is purely hierarchical cronyism, but is still given a pass because it’s supposedly (but isn’t) based on eternal verities.
No wonder government is disrespected.
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Member since: Mon Dec 3, 2007, 04:38 PMNumber of posts: 148
