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Common Sense 7/30/2013 8:08:45 AM
Politicians ought to do what their parents taught them, concerning others. Providing they taught them the Golden Rule and not White Supremacy.
Hopefully most of us teach our kids to listen to others’ opinions and to give strangers the benefit of the doubt. We teach them not to ridicule those that are different than we are. Maybe there’s a kid in class who wears hand-me-downs or wears the same sweater two days in a row. I come from a farm community where hand-me-downs were the norm. I had five brothers, and I was number three; three of us wore the same shirt successively. It’s in the yearbook.
What bothers me about politics is ideologues don’t live up to these same expectations. They start with an idea, then connive (see the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute) for ways to convince the voting public that they’re right. Yet if you ran a poll, I’d bet that most Americans think conservatives are right on common sense issues. Well, let’s look at that, shall we?
1. Climate change. 97% of climatologists argue that carbon based fuels are responsible for the greenhouse effect. Yet we have politicians arguing that we need a pipeline from the Canadian tar pits (the worst kind of pollution possible, except for maybe coal) to Texas. Why Texas? So the oil barons can sell this oil to South America. Philadelphia has recently experienced two six inch rain events in the past couple of weeks. What’s causing this? Could it be the huge patch of Artic ice the size of the United States that melted? Paul Douglas, a meteorologist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune who’s been a weather man for well over twenty years, has never seen a jet stream like the one he’s seeing on his computer projections. And that gets us a horrible heat wave in the West and monsoons in the east. Wouldn’t an adult assume that people smarter than they are know better than they do and try to find an alternate fuel, instead of taking kickbacks from conservative lobbyists or listening to a biased jackass like Rush Limbaugh? (How is he worth 400 million dollars?)
2. Gay rights. Does anybody really believe that a gay man or woman has a choice in the matter? They’re born that way. Even the pope said the other day: “Who am I to judge?” Actually he’s the Pope; they’ve been judging for millenniums. The last one, Benedict the XIV, finally overruled John Paul II’s specious ruling on male contraception in Africa after thousands, if not millions, of deaths from A.I.D.S. And he’s up for sainthood? Then there’s the matter of bullying if not physical harassment. Gay bashing is not a verbal assault. Do I need to mention Matthew Shepherd? Yet we have thirty some red states with laws denying homosexuals the same rights as everyone else.
3. Illegal aliens. It seems like conservatives want to get even with all the “wetbacks,” who got into the country illegally, instead of taking a mature approach. There are something like twelve million of them, if not more.
Orange, peach, strawberry etc. growers need them. They don’t have to pay them minimum wage, and they’re not complaining too much because they still make more than they did in Mexico. Besides, how many of them had a choice in the matter? Many of them were children taken across the border by their parents. Okay, here’s the big argument. In 1845, the United States started a war with Mexico over border problems. Usually it was us violating their borders. See Texas. Before the Alamo, American immigrants were barred for thirty years, but they kept on coming. They put up a pretty good fight, considering, but we won the war and we got the spoils. Boy, did we ever. California, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona etc., etc. So . . . who are the real illegal aliens? As Pogo used to say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What was the senate plan? 13 years to gain citizenship? That’s probably too long. It sounds a little like being born with original sin for something Adam and Eve did.
Bravo John McCain. He had to swing right to win reelection, and he picked the clueless Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, but now he’s talking to President Obama on a lot of different issues. Unfortunately he’s one of only a few. We need a budget plan. We need revenue to pay down the national debt and balance the budget. I don’t mind a requirement that we balance the budget. We’d probably do it like the states do anyway: kick the can down the road. Obama’s speech on the inequity between the middle class and the fat cats was pivotal. We need a ten dollar minimum wage. I heard a statistic last night: four out of five Americans will experience poverty at some time in their lives. Think about it. I know I did. We always had enough to eat because we lived on a farm, but a dentist once refused to fill a tooth because I was a student and had no way to pay him. Yet. If a lawyer can work pro bono, so can a dentist, especially if my family had been going to that same dentist all their lives; he’s dead, but I still go to the same place. His daughter is a dental hygienist.
It’s time for the ideologues to look at the evidence first before they take a stand. Progressives already do. The root word of progressive is progress. What would be the consequences if we went off the gold standard and did away with the Federal Reserve Board? The Federal Reserve Board was formed because economists were tired of the constant depressions the country experienced. The first Federal Reserve Board was the National Bank, and it was formed by the greatest economic genius this country has ever know, Alexander Hamilton. He was never president, but his picture is on the ten dollar bill. Conservatives would like to replace his picture with that spendthrift Ronald Reagan.
