Sunday, November 13, 2016

What Must be Done

It is very easy to look for reasons why this terrible thing has happened.  It's very easy to mourn and grieve for this loss.  The reasons why and feeling bad for what happened, however, do not solve the problem.

There is currently a realignment going on in the political parties of this country.  All wedge issues and core beliefs are now being bowed around one key issue.  It isn't outsider versus insider.  It's not change versus stagnation.  A change is happening.  At the core of the political realignment going on in this nation and across the Western World right now is the fight between corporation and person.  In one camp the wealthy and their influences are bleeding the world dry, treating people like cattle, a sharecrop between corporations.  In the other, the people of this nation are banding together.

Corporations are not people, as much as certain small numbers of wealthy people would otherwise say.  They have no real power.  It is an illusion.  The election of Donald Trump ripped open the Republican Party, bent over the barrel of corporate interests.  Now the Democratic Party take a hard look at itself.  The fractured collection of differing points of view under the guise of liberalism has reached its breaking point as well.  It will rupture in the coming months.  It has already begun in the highest levels of the Party as it tries to find its voice for the 2018 election cycle.

If we are smart, we tap into the power that has caused the ruptures in both parties.  People. We pull that power into the Democratic Party.  We embrace it.  We remove from the Party all corporate influence, because people, real living breathing people, are at their breaking point.  Tap into the frustration of millions of people in the Western World, who have been de facto enslaved by corporation over the past forty years, and we can rise up and rebalance our society.  We can repair the damage caused by Donald Trump and the uber wealthy.  We can make this country work, as it should, for all of us.  

The fact is that business is not evil into and of itself.  It is however far over-extended in its influence currently.  Wage laws have been decimated.  The earning power of the middle class has been flattened.  Corporations are supposed to work for the people, for us.  We are not supposed to be beholden to corporations.  Peel back the veneer of the corporation and see them for what they are.  They are a few people, fewer than a hundred, who control our health through their impact on the ACA, our education through their big contracts with the Department of Education and the pseudo-functional charter school system that fleeces billions out of education and into their own pockets, to proxy wars functionally carried out by the government but padding the pockets of the uber wealthy and costing us our lives-- quite literally your personal well-being.

In the words of George Carlin, "The upper class: keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes.  The middle class: pays all of the taxes, does all of the work.  The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class--keep them showing up at their jobs."

We are enslaved to them.

Now is the time to right the ship.  Now power will swing back in our direction.  Not because of Trump.  Certainly not as a result of anything he does.  But in defiance to him.  In defiance to the system he represents.  In defiance to racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other tool of division they use against us to weaken us.  We, the people, are strong together.  One people.  And we are coming.