This is reminiscent to me of an opinion piece I saw a few months ago in The
Commonweal titled "Three Cheers for Socialism" by David Bentley Hart. I
don't know much about the writer or the publication, I just happened across
this particular piece. I've shared a passage from it below that reflects my
feelings on the issue.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated
people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own
history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various
social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly
know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised
within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have
been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy
far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state,
than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic
institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the
excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can
elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded
to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes
precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are
far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to
receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable
insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more
subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more
in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and
then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as
almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a
people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the
principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept
taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have
become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in
the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that
taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return,
solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial
complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 12:23 PM Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Yes, but whatever union movement we had, has been co-opted. We have
nothing that resembles the peace movement of the 1960's. Our whole society
has been corrupted by the worship of material success and if you compare
what we have now to the 40's and 50's, everything has been privatized and
the profit motive is the rule. Certainly, there are people fighting back.
But I'm afraid that Chris Hedges' view of our reality is closer to the
truth than we'd like to admit.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <
blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2020 11:47 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How did Americans become such Wimps?
Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post
Office, Plots Election Fraud
Interesting. my spin is that there is a greater, and a growing, level of
protest.
And this protest is not reserved to just one issue. The signs, to me, is
that the American Empire is following the path of all Empires. As the
Empire spirals downward the Ruling Class is being confronted on all sides,
forcing it to wildly charge its former supporters of treasonous
activities. Donald Trump has conducted an ever more vicious attack on
Journalists and the Media in general. He has stepped up his attack on Joe
Biden and the "Leftist Democrat Party".
He has robbed the National Treasury, giving huge piles of taxpayer's money
to his billionaire supporters. He has fought against creating work
programs such as those created by the Roosevelt administration during the
Great Depression. He has failed the Working Class Americans by not
providing any positive leadership. He has doubled up in his efforts to
trash public education and the Post Office. He has caused Americans to not
trust their own government by trashing high government officials(many of
whom he originally appointed). Through all of this negativity he is
turning a once mighty Empire into Trash...just as he did with his fabulous
Taj Mahal.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens ofMSNBC have at least brought it up.
Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election
Fraud JUAN COLE
08/10/2020
2KSHARES
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at
the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are
staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the
coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last
quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.
Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on
Trump's say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the
destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office,
on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is
after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental
regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off
poisoning us. I don't think the neutering of the EPA has even been
reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on
broke.
Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a
satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo "Rugged
individualism works best when we obey."
In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and
powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege.
We have become wimps. The word wimp may come from "whimper." It was
used in a newspaper in 1920, and then not again until 1960. Since then
it may have been influenced by the character of "Wimpy" in the Popeye
cartoons, who did not have much gumption. He was only good at mooching
off people in search of a hamburger.
I always thought Americans were the plucky Popeye, who knew how to get
iron in their diets and show some spunk.
Turns out we have been reduced to begging for our meals.
The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over
substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like
Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In
1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white
Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn't vote for Mondale
because he was a "panty-waist." Reagan took away their right to strike
and took away government services by running up the deficit and
cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government
couldn't provide the services the people had paid for because it is
interrupted.
Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people
don't realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and
they often won't actually get any golden years.
What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.
Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine
themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to
raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can't understand why. France
has persistently high unemployment as it is.
In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and
they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was
Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But
one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on
for months, and were very inconvenient.