I belong to a clergy study group. Well, we say we’re a study group, and we do reflect on weighty issues in a formal way. But the real reason we get together is to ruminate on how things have gone to hell since our day.
And, I swear.
I love this country, rotten oligarchic republic that it is.
And everything is going to hell…
For a while we’ve had an uneasy balance between the grasping excesses of our capitalist hearts and the deep body knowing that we only exist within relationship.
But that time seems nearly over…
There has been a relentless trending in favor of the rich at the expense of everyone else for some time. A couple of decades ago Ronald Reagan was at the head of a movement that successfully split the interests of the poor from those of the middle classes. Mean spirited, and nasty…
And now we’re watching the division of the public sector middle classes from the rest, with a fairly obvious end of defunding the largest contributors to the Democrats and their more progressive, and even occasionally communitarian stances.
Those who object are accused and successfully to many minds of fomenting class warfare.
But here’s the ugly truth.
This war has being going on for a while.
And someone is winning…
Personally I blame the short term “in it for me” philosophy that undergirds libertarianism which is becoming the state religion here in the good old US of A, and what is increasingly looking like the dismantling of government by people who think it will liberate them, when in fact it will simply shake off the constraints on the rich and powerful.
What is happening is people volunteering to become serfs because they’ve been sold a bill of goods that the “state” or “unions” or other “socialist” or “nanny state” institutions are their enemy, when in fact government is that last line between the truly powerful and the rest of us…
Watching Wisconsin and elsewhere, with governments abdicating their responsibility in mitigating the worst excesses of corporations, tearing down the protections of ordinary people, with their active consent, of course, leaves me less than happy…
Ugly stuff.
And more to come, I fear…
Thanks to libertarianism the philosophy of selfishness for giving us the knife and guiding us to cut our own throats.
It is hard not to see the middle classes divided and uncaring about anyone but number one left to the mercies of the corporations, now “persons” in law, and with rights no individuals actually have, and powers…
All equal under the law…
Sort of…
Of course, in some ways, that’s how its always been. Oligarchic republic…
Everybody knows…
But, geeze…
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