"Well answer me
this. Why should I have to give up some of my hard earned money for someone I don't know?
Why should I help him out? blah blah blah… The liberals are the devil's
minions!"
Sound familiar? This often repeated cliche of conservative hogwash is exactly my point. I'd like to pose a few questions of my own to
conservatives:
When did we become
so utterly and vehemently opposed to helping each other out? Why is it so wrong to come together and
cooperate for the good of humanity? What
happened to "love thy neighbor"??
Where are your "Christian morals" at? What happened to "WE THE
PEOPLE"?
I'll tell you what's
happened to "we the people."
It has been replaced by "we are individuals, don't fuck with our
cash." We are slaves now to the
idea of business, property, and
money. But most of all, we have become slaves to our individual need to follow our rational self-interest even if we leave bodies in our wake. We don't even know why we're
doing it anymore. Perhaps it's just me,
but I thought the state's purpose was to save us from this mentality we had in
the state of nature; the one where we stomp on each other's throats
to get ahead. If we wanted to live in
Lord of the Flies, why the hell did we bother with the creation of a central government in the first place? We are becoming the very tyranny that we were
escaping from when we fled to this country.
But alas, right-wingers I know keep
asking me "is one not entitled to the sweat of their brow?" Well, was it by your brow alone? Or did you have help from the State, your
employees, your customers, our institutions and laws? If you mow someone's lawn, you are entitled
to the rewards of your labor. If you run a business ALL on your
own, you are entitled to it. But if you
had help, why not share with the civilization who made it possible, the one you
happen to be a part of? No? That's a shame, because your business will
not be around much longer if we don't change this terribly selfish attitude we
all seem to have.
My point is simply
this: We need to come together as human
beings in this nation, or we will certainly die as the self-serving individuals
we have become. Live together or die alone.
Emerson once wrote:
"Personal
rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the
census; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of
owning. There is an instinctive sense,
however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property,
on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons
deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only
interest for the consideration for the State is persons; that property will
always follow persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of
men; and that if men can be educated, the institutions will share their
improvement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land."
The highest end of
government should be the good of humanity. NOT
business and money, or what our GDP is, and how many iPhones you have. We have become such slaves to our material
possessions and our need to acquire them, that we forget we are a society
of more than ourselves. We need to pitch
in for civilization to work. So YES, I
think universal healthcare is reasonable and practical. YES, I think the welfare program is needed
even though it is occasionally abused through poor legislation and the few
criminals who know how to get around the system. YES, I want the big corporate monopolies to
go fuck themselves and be converted to employee owned companies, the banks
turned into credit unions, and Rush Limbaugh to eat a dick. YES, I want freedom. But freedom, as conservatives often repeat while
defending their warmongering, is NOT free.
It takes a little help from everyone.
And we need to remember that capitalism is an economic function of a
civilization, not the political system which unites it.
In a truly civilized world, democracy is king and capitalism it's jester. Vote more power to the people, and stop giving our rights away to corporate entities and political lobbies that have no interest in the social contract that allowed them to exist.
