By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”
— Mary Harris Jones
From the title of this piece you might think we are going to talk about the massive nightmare of housing foreclosure, seemingly unstoppable and so tangled by incestuous financing that there seems no viable answer for this national emergency. Or perhaps you think we’re going to explore the conservatives’ war on women’s rights, attacking from every direction at once and leaving women more vulnerable than they’ve been in a generation or more. From abortion to contraception, from family planning to proposed laws favoring the life of the fetus over the life of the mother, a woman’s right to make informed decisions about her own bodily functions is in jeopardy from coast to coast.
Maybe you think, reading the title, that we are going to address Obama’s budget, something of a self-inflicted wound with its horrific cuts to public services and discretionary spending, while Republicans exercise their new power of the purse to demand even more draconian cuts to existing programs. Common folks will now be punished for the greed and avarice of the rich, who are too well-heeled to be required to take responsibility for their actions.
When you read that there’s nowhere to turn, any of these issues might come to mind, because each is an emergency that is beyond our control and immune to our influence. Earlier attempts to reign in disinformation and political cover for these issues failed, and now the country has become radicalized – but not in a good way. We used to be reasonable people. It wasn’t all that long ago that we appeared to be functional, able to hold a discussion without waving a gun, able to engage in rational dialog, to establish policy and carry it out. It wasn’t all that long ago that we took pride in our diversity, in our political system and our ability to protect civil liberties for our melting pot of a republic. Not that long ago America was admired for her attributes, not reviled for her attitudes.