Listening to the President President Obama always said it wasn’t about him, but about us. We didn’t fully understand. We thought he would go to the White House and fix everything, instantly. We didn’t anticipate slogging through the complexities of legislation. We didn’t count on a running battle over every initiative. We didn’t understand we would have to fight to pass the Stimulus, fight our Governor over the stimulus and then fight a bunch of Republicans claiming the Stimulus needs to be repealed while they happily spent stimulus funds on road projects. We didn’t expect every fact to be disputed, and when the facts were proved, that our opposition would retreat into theoretical paranoia about the future, which we can’t disprove. Conservatives claim the jobs repairing public housing in Charleston aren’t real, but the men on the roof I see from the bus look real. Their nail guns are real. The nails and shingles are real. The florescent bulbs being socketed into thousands of light fixtures are real, purchased from real suppliers and the energy they save will be real. The quarter million dollars in funding to fine arts organizations in Charleston is real and it’s targeted towards real projects. The nights where stages and galleries will be lit up next fall and spring will be real. The supplies purchased will be real. The restaurant meals people purchase before the show will be real. The people doing lab work at my wife’s place of employment on superfund cleanup projects are real and they day when those desperate people were hired was real to their families. The poisonous filth in the ground they will help ferret out is real. The cancer drinking water contaminated with those materials is also real. If it stays in the ground long enough, someone will drink it. A Conservative World A world where the public housing rots, energy is wasted, culture disappears and the water is tainted with toxic waste can be real too. It’s a world conservatives are happy to let happen. Some massive corporation will sell us water with they say is clean. When the deep ocean oil we “drill baby drill” comes up at six dollars a gallon production costs, we’ll enjoy knowing we didn’t waste any money on windmills, solar and battery development. We can keep the poor at bay with our firearms. The medication our private doctor is happy to prescribe and which is advertised on television will sort of keep us happy, at least quiet. That’s not the World President Obama wants and it’s not the world many of us want either.  Obama isn't perfect. The right wing opposition believes the best plan is to do nothing and hope our problems get solved by random luck. Solutions are hard and with the right running five attack ads an hour on CNN, it’s no wonder people are confused.
After all, for most of the conservative class, the floor hasn't caved in yet. Sure, it's now their relatives and neighbors, instead of just the poor people across town in the little houses, but they make all the right decisions and they'll be OK. They can armchair quarterback other people’s mistakes in a complex unforgiving world. They believe if we just get government out of the way, the world of 39 cent gas and
American global economic superiority will just fall back into place. The Arabs will surrender their oil for pennies. The Chinese will stock Walmart with the products of labor barely paid for indefinitely. They’ll be able to sail through a world where the people who cook their food, build their homes and make their bed at the hospital don’t earn enough to see a doctor, get their child to a decent school or enjoy a measure of modest security. One of the people who counter protested our little Healthcare event a few weeks ago informed me that if he got sick, he would pay for it. If he couldn’t he would just declare bankruptcy. He was prepared to take responsibility for his actions. The hospital stuck with his unpaid charges might consider that an inadequate type of responsibility, but they’ll simply shift some of that unpaid overhead to your bill to be absorbed by your payments or your companies health plan. In SC that’s already over $600 per year per family. Selfishness and responsibility aren’t the same thing. Simple Conservative Solutions Like most of what we’re hearing from the right in their attacks upon the Presidents complex solutions to our big problems, the conservative answers are superficial, incomplete and unworkable. Jim DeMint’s delusional health plan is a one page summary which proposes a small scale temporary solution to a chronic, historic problem that won't work. Here's a critique. DeMint’s simple tax plan shifts the burden of taxation massively to the middle class and exempts most business from paying anything. At least his plan for school prayer is workable. It’s unfair, unconstitutional and anti Christian, but a moment of government sanctioned hypocrisy at the start of the school day can be implemented now. Perhaps Mark Sanford can lead the prayer via Satellite hookup from the C Street house. If God’s standards for devotion were that low, butterflies and flowers would look like they were made of injection molded plastic in China. I'm a divorce lawyer. I take people's families apart. I go through their bills. I get the Financial Declarations where the bills, including medical bills pile up. I've watched middle class economic security ebb away for the last twenty years, taking families down with it. I’ve watched mom go to work. I’ve seen Dad take side jobs on the weekends. I’ve watched families live by refinancing debt against their appreciating real estate. I saw houses sell for less than they had been worth. Later less than was owed on them. Now it’s less than was paid for them. I’ve watched people pack and take their children to grandma’s. I’ve watched unemployment run out. I’ve seen healthcare coverage lapse. I’ve torn up long, impressive bills for my services in the faces of clients and told them that if they get to heaven before me, I would like that unpaid balance added to my account. I’ve had Republican real estate agents tell me to buy houses I couldn’t afford as investments which are rotting in the sun now, homes so expensive virtually no one earning a living in my community could afford them. I’ve seen conservatives tell the middle class to accept less, work more and trust the massive corporations to share the bounty of God’s earth with them. South Carolina's Conservative Constant  The one conservative constant is that the unlucky always make the wrong choice because they are lazy, because they sin or because they are dumb. It’s un-American. It’s unchristian. It’s irrational. It’s delusional. It will end in our time. Unless we build something fairer, better and more sustainable, the wolves will claw through our door one night and we’ll get our opportunity to try our luck at the ECCO food bank, where the pumps of charity are already red lined now.
What We Must Do. South Carolina has been identified as the lwo budget, red state test bed for a neoliberatian future for America. Howard Rich and others believe we're a place where poverty, ignorance and racism make the purchase of influence within our political system affordable and effective. The political left hasn't been well organized here in the past and they're plenty or rednecks to drive us into hiding. Read a report on these efforts Their theory is an insult to every South Carolinian, from the PhD. teaching my son Algebra at Wando High School to the Sunday school teacher leading her charges in a chorus of "Jesus Loves the Little Children." Obama has to work through the complex and imperfect mechanism of Government, which is less responsive and efficient than the exploitive mechanisms of Goldman Sacks. It is going to be harder than we thought, cost more than we thought and take longer than we thought.
Bitching from the couch won't help. Yelling at the TV does not work. Grab a clipboard and hit the street, call a meeting, or hold an event. We have professional leadership for several organizations in South Carolina now. We have some weathered veterans to help the new kids learn how it’s done. Show up, hug the people who get nervous and remember to bring the flag and the Bible. Challenge the next redneck declaration you hear, even if it is only to say, “I’m not that kind of person and I’ll be leaving now.” Go find better friends. Go make a better world. You’ll never have a better chance than now and you may never have another chance unless you do it now. |
Yesterday the President of the United States asked for the assistance of progressive bloggers from across the nation to come to the support of his policies, using our capacity for the discussion of complex ideas to challenge the cloud of hate and deceit the right wing rainmakers have been drumming up all summer.
