The Party of Me

I have been wanting to write about this for a while, but the concept didn't seem fully formed. But sometimes writing about it can help to more fully form a concept. I am no longer going to assume that I am going to come back to a post, because that has never happened. What I want to write about is the Republican party, which I think is basically the Party of Me. As in, I've got mine, so don't bother Me. I've got my money, so don't bother Me. I've got my health care, so don't bother Me. It really does boil down to the question: "Do you have ANY empathy for your fellow man?" Not your friends of course, but people that you don't know. Do you give a crap about the other people in the world, or not? Are you willing to pay a little extra in taxes so that the government can help take care of people who can't take care of themselves? It amazes me how much mileage Reagan got out of his "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" meme. I don't deny that they probably exist, but they are likely an incredibly small fraction. The vast majority of people on welfare probably really need it. But no, because some people abuse the system, then the whole concept must be wrong. But it is OK of course for all the rich and famous to game the system with all their lobbyists and offshore accounts and not paying taxes. That is another thing that bothers me - if people think they can tell one anecdote that sheds negative light on something, then that summarizes and indicts the entire system. "Hey, we found 3 welfare queens in NYC, so therefore Welfare Must Be Bad." Of course it is really just using anecdotes to indict a system they already don't believe in. It is related to the whole "government screws up everything" concept, which is related to the odious concept of generalizations. I am sure it is expressed well in other places, but one of the quotes from his mother that Jim Cramer used in one of his articles I think expresses it very well: My mother always said, "Comparisons are odious.” She didn't want us to make judgments about people or entities because they often lead to false conclusions, bigotry, unhappy and hurt feelings and sweeping generalizations when the real story is more gray than black and white." - James Cramer, RealMoney.com, 6/29/2004 What prompted me to finally do some writing on this is I heard some guy call in to the Thom Hartman program and say he didn't want gov't involved with health care because they screwed up "Cash for Clunkers." Thom rightly pointed out that a) that is a very successful program, and b) so is the VA health care program. Would the guy want to change that? It is just this one-dimensional thinking that has created this divide in the country. I just think the Republican party has devolved from being able to muster up a little bit of empathy in the Nixon era of environmental regulations and a proposed health care bill to the left of Obama's to this extremist party that is pretty much only concerned with themselves and their friends. Why poor white rural voters continue to vote for them is beyond me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An addition to the sadness

 2/11/2023: Well, as expected, I have not been back to this blog much since my last post a couple of months ago. Alisa's progression has progressed unfortunately, and her speech is really suffering. This is part of the brutality of #ALS - it just keeps taking things away from you. As one of our friends said, we have to keep "riding the waves of loss." Quite accurate, but some are worse than others. For my dear Lis, speaking is something she was good at, and always had lots of nice things to say to people, so I can't imagine how difficult it is to have her preferred form of expression curtailed so drastically, especially in the devastating drip, drip, drip fashion that it happens in #ALS. We are just over a year in from diagnosis (1/13/22), which is both hard to believe, and depressing, especially looking back at how she was a year ago, speaking reasonably well, walking well, etc. A picture came up on my phone of her and Bella up on Mt Toby right about a year ago, with
Read more

A Simple Twist of Fate

Although I am not much of a Dylan fan - I could never get past his mediocre voice - my partner Alisa is, and this is one of her favorite songs. And it applies brutally to what has happened to her, which is that she was formally diagnosed with #ALS in January 2022, after a series of doctor visits. So this blog is going to turn into a a bit of an #ALS journal for a while, although not necessarily exclusively. We have a CaringBridge site set up so I'll not duplicate much of that. One thing that didn't make it on the CB site was my initial email to family and friends, which I do want to reproduce here as a record of how things went early on. I'm going to go back a little bit for those who haven't been part of the process early on. We noticed some speech and swallowing difficulties in the late spring early summer last year. We didn't think too much about it (but should have of course), thinking it was due to some sores in her mouth (as opposed to the cause of those sore
Read more

Does Religion Have A Corner On Moral Values?

Reading this editorial in the NY Times, I was reminded of an idea that occurred to me sometime ago: why do moral values = religion? It is of course my contention that they don't, which is well illustrated in the article, but perhaps even more so by the pedophilia in the Catholic church and the other sex/money scandals involving prominent evangelists. But after the last election, which was supposedly decided by "values voters," the media in general equated them with religious people. Personally, some of the most moral people I know have nothing to do with religion. They simply care about other people, animals and the earth, and act accordingly. Religious people generally favor "traditional" values, which is all well and good as long as profession of those values is not simply a cover for behavior in direct contradiction of those values.
Read more