The propaganda machine should be shifting into high gear any day now. The California Supreme Court hearing on Prop 8 is March 4, and I can't imagine the haters laying low until afterward.
The supporters, if they're smart will get out in big numbers, but do so peacefully. They'll make their presence known and they'll not make a big confrontational deal out of it...if they're smart. They're seldom smart.
The Dow is wending it's way very quickly down through 7k and appears headed for 1995 territory. We can't afford it anymore. Of course we can't afford anything anymore. I'd like to see what the popular opinion is when we can no longer afford 2001 prices and it's time for retailers and manufacturers alike to drop their prices. The end is NOT near, and we just get to stand here and watch.
Health Care is going to cost over 8k per person this year. And according to Michael Moore, Richard Nixon is to blame for supporting Kaiser Permanente. No surprise that business is screwing the people. What never ceases to amaze me is that as smart as business is, it's never smart enough to stop when the stopping is good. They've just gotta keep going and going until someone either steps in and stops them, or the marketplace collapses under its own weight.
We're headed for smaller everything. Smaller cars, houses, lives, and the one thing we need desperately, a smarter populace, well, it just isn't going to happen. As another of the interviewees in Sicko said , "An educated, healthy, confident population is difficult to govern." Well, we've seen prof that our government doesn't want that now haven't we.
The money that needs to be spent is on the future. We need to clean our water, our air, and renew our urban cores. We need to commit to civil rights for everyone, and renew our commitment to keeping church and state separate. We need to provide health care for all of our citizens, and we need to provide a quality education to anyone who is willing to do the work to get it. We need to stop creating diploma mills that hand out degrees for filling out forms online. We need to stop devaluing the bachelor's degree to the point that it's today's high school diploma, and if we're going to practice segregation, then let's segregate the smart and REALLY educate them. Let's put our best minds to work training more great minds and then actually listen to what they have to say. We need to get smart and right quick or we're going to stop being the world's leader.
Mexico has taken one of the most crowded, most polluted, most crime-ridden cities on the face of the earth and is successfully turning it into a model of what our 21st Century cities must become.
And we're fighting over who gets to marry.
France, I am given to understand, provides health care, house calls, college education, and mandated vacation, among many other things, and they're not awash in taxes.
And we're admonishing the President for getting new helicopters he didn't even order.
England supports its people in many similar ways, yet they all manage to have a higher and healthier standard of living than we ever have.
And we had to take Ground Zero rescuers to Cuba for adequate health care.
Why will we not see that the people we have helped make it back from the brink of destruction took advantage of that help and made their country better? Why, if we can facilitate that kind of massive cultural change in other countries will we not even discuss making it in our own?
We look at certain groups, like the gays, as self destructive sinners, yet we continue to stumble down the primrose path to collective ruin and we do nothing more than point the finger of blame as we falter along. Our zeal over religion is destroying us. Let's ask Germany how well zeal served them.
Nationalization, Socialization(read communism,)bailouts, takeovers. These are the new code words for fear. "Live in fear" that's the motto of the old guard of the Republican party, and that's exactly what their followers do. They march in lock step to the tarantella of fear. What war and terrorism couldn't make us afraid of, poverty will.
If the conspiracy theorists can't make a case for a unified effort to tear the country apart, then one certainly can make a case for a convergence of greed, stupidity, and laissez-faire that created an atmosphere which can bring something we once held dear to its knees.
Is our current "plan" going to fix the problem? I doubt it. It's as though those who have the wealth can't see what's about to happen. It's as though the strength of their ability to deny reality can overpower the truth. And that truth is that this country is changing in ways none of us fully understands yet. And I think it's changing in some ways that will humble a once very proud and confident people.
I think the entire system needs to be reinvented, and that needs to be done by people who are willing to do it responsibly. Do we have that guy? I don't think so, I think we've laid a whole shitload of stuff at the doorstep of one guy and expected him to make it all ok.
We've been kept so naive and stupid by our own government that we don't know any better. So here we sit, on our hands waiting for the downfall. And it's not going to be one of those World Trade Center moments.
It's going to be as simple as someone very powerful picking up a phone and calling in a marker.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and we lit the match. Our whimper will barely be perceptible.
