Sometimes I wish I could be one of those people who bury their heads in the sand and remain blissfully unaware that the world is falling apart around them. I mean, once the shit really hits the fan, maybe they’ll get a clue. But then again, maybe not. They’ll just point the finger of blame at someone else and conveniently forget that they stood idly by while we were all being mugged.
I find it disturbing that there are people in our government who are signing right wing pledges. What is that all about? I thought when one was elected to higher office, the point was to serve the people of your state or district or country—maybe all three—and not some crackpot person or group with an agenda. Apparently I was mistaken because we have an entire party in Congress that has signed a pledge to Grover Norquist. Is that like the Pledge of Allegiance? Is that like taking the Oath of Office? Looks to me like it supercedes both. And how about the pledge signed by Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum to outlaw being gay and says that black children were better off in slavery? WTF? Do these people believe this crap? Oh wait, Bachmann backtracked and said she didn’t know what she was signing and that she didn’t sign on for everything that was in that racist, bigoted pledge that festered and then poured out of the minds of some off the wall group of Iowans. I mean no disrespect to the people of Iowa. I am confident that there are Iowans who cringed just like the rest of us when they heard about it. Every state and every country has its share of crackpots and I won’t use a broad brush when a fine tipped pen will do. But back to Bachmann. So she’s saying that she just signed it without reading it because… Because why? She wants the Iowa caucuses to elect her in the primary. Therefore, she will throw citizens of this country under the bus in her effort to pander to the lowest of the low. That’s what I want in a president! Doesn’t everyone?
Every day I see the news and every day it gets worse. I keep on waiting for the people who represent us to stand up and do something but all they do is argue and point fingers and nothing gets done. Well, actually something is being done. Our country is being dismantled systematically. Just look at the ridiculous spectacle we recently bore witness to. All that crap about the debt ceiling. So it was finally raised and the result? Our credit rating was lowered anyway. Because our president let the terms of the debate be dictated by a bunch of crazy people who know nothing about governing and everything about fear mongering, we are now in an even weaker position. But John Boehner got 98% of what he wanted. Makes you wonder what 100% would have looked like.
So here’s the truth. We have succumbed to exactly what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about in his presidential farewell address. The Military Industrial Complex is here and it is chewing us up and spitting us out. We are being bankrupted but make no mistake, the Koch Brothers and the Bushes of the world are making money hand over fist and they will continue to do so. Wealth doesn’t just dry up—it is sucked up and concentrated into the pockets of greedy, amoral thugs dressed up in five thousand dollar suits. With that wealth they buy our lawmakers and dictate policies to suit their own agendas. We are in a fight for our very way of life and people like the Koch Brothers are trying to take EVERYTHING away from us. The Supreme Court has been subverted. The Congress has been subverted. And those Tea Party schmucks are supporting policies that are detrimental to them. They’re just too scared, too angry, too bigoted and too dim to realize that they being manipulated by people who would step over their dying bodies on the way to dinner at the Four Seasons.
I’ll end with a true story from my own life.
When I was a little girl in the first and second grade, I was routinely terrorized by the school bully. The incident that stands out most clearly took place on a winter day. I was walking home from school and he swooped down on me like a bird of prey. I was wearing a stocking cap—one of those long, woolly things that tied under the chin and had a long tail that one could wrap around the neck like a scarf. He tore the cap from my head and threw it up into a tree and then he grabbed my schoolbooks and threw them down the sewer. He laughed in my face and ran away as I stood there crying.
In the middle of my third grade year my family moved. You can imagine my horror when I learned we moved next door to my nemesis. I did my best to avoid him and sometimes it worked. Other times it didn’t. During the summer when I was ten years old, I emerged from the basement of my house with a plastic pail and shovel and was heading towards the sandbox in my backyard. I was going to practice making sand castles in preparation for the family vacation in Ocean. City. As I walked along the side of my house, Bobby the Bully appeared with his cadre of friends. Bobby was fourteen and quite a bit bigger than I was. He grabbed the pail, spun me around and kicked me in the rear end and started chanting “Kick the baby in the hinee, kick the baby in the hinee.” All of his friends stood there laughing and jeering, expecting me to cry like the little girl that I was. It was the last straw. I went berserk. I grabbed him and tore into him: kicking, scratching, biting, screaming. His friends freaked and went running. Bobby couldn’t get away from me. He was wearing a brand new white T-shirt and, in his quest to escape me, he pulled away with such force that the shirt was actually torn from his body. He went screaming home to his mother. He never bothered me again.
I think that’s what we progressives need to do. The Tea Party can dish it out but can they take it? I don’t think so. I think they’re just a bunch of bullies and the only power they have is the power we give to them. I’m not advocating violence, mind you, but I think it’s time we figuratively kicked their ass. And while we’re at it, we need to let our president know that it’s time to get his ass in gear and be the president we elected him to be. We all like that he’s an intellectual but we’d also like to see a little John Shaft. At least I would. How about you?
