Last December, my adult daughter became a statistic on a government chart a few days before her 33rd birthday. Just another casualty of the opioid epidemic. Meanwhile the people responsible for creating that epidemic—the oligarchs who run Big Pharma and the politicians and government officials who serve them for personal and family gain—walk away wealthier and no wiser.
Every time I go to work at the office in downtown Cleveland, and frequently when I get off the highway on my way home, I encounter homeless people. Yet the capitalists who control the real estate market and the politicians and government officials who serve them act to criminalize the homeless instead of making sure they have the fundamental human right of shelter.
Every time I see some journalist or citizen demonetized, suspended, or banned from the public square, an important part of which is Facebook, Twitter, and everything Google, for questioning the wild propaganda that is constantly spewed by the federal government and corporate media, I see liberals cheering for this.
Our government is waging a proxy war against one nuclear-armed power on its fracking borders, and irritating another by encouraging one of its legally recognized provinces to consider secession, which would result in a civil war. I have several cousins serving in the US armed forces right now, and all are at risk, not to defend the American people, but to profit a few criminal oligarchs and their people. Of course, liberals are cheering for this madness as well.
Democrats rigged their own primaries twice, got caught at it, said they had the right to do it, and that was that. This was not democracy, but selection by a few, or oligarchy in its purest form. The Democratic Party itself is an oligarchy, and a very profitable one to boot. Liberals, of course, tell me that if I don’t vote for Democrats then I am voting for Republicans and therefore a bad, morally despicable person.
Democrats made the promise to provide health care to people like my daughter, had the power to do so, and chose not to do it. Democrats have promised to end homelessness countless times in my life, and have chosen not to do it.
Democrats promised to end corporate domination of the media once upon a time, and then used their power to increase that domination in 1996 and have enjoyed the financial rewards ever since.
In 2020, Democrats selected and then elected a man who bragged about a crime bill that has turned millions of working class Americans, especially Black men, into prison slave labor and then stacked the deck against them when they got out of prison in the hopes that they would go back there and be exploited again some day.
In short, political and economic policies of the Democratic Party have harmed me, my family, many people I know, my community, and my community’s children.
Yet liberals have scolded me for saying things like this in the past. I am a privileged white guy, they say(ironic since most of them are also white and have more money than I), or I am being selfish or I am ignoring the few other poor people they have helped in incremental ways or I am hurting (insert persecuted ID politics group here) by my attitude and they are glad to be the virtuous folks they are by thinking correctly.
It is not enough for them to disagree with me. They must, somehow, either convert me to their cause or deny me the right to express my opinions without being screamed at and demonized. This is, of course, the way cult members behave, not to mention the way good citizens in Oceania or Nazi Germany behaved.
I’m sorry, but I simply can’t respect people who act like that, much less vote for them. It still gives me absolutely no reason to vote Republican, either, but the way I see it, it would be difficult for them to be worse than the Democrats at this point. Whoever I do or don’t vote for, Republicans will take power, and then do their part to hasten Imperial American decline and the ultimate downfall of this whole, hopelessly corrupt edifice of capitalist hubris that now rules the US of A.
Thank you for reading. Good night, and good luck.
Yesterday I downloaded an Ebook RFK, Jr. has available on the CHD website: “A Letter to Liberals”. Just started it, but a good read so far. You might like it also; it’s a free download, so no cost to give it a look.
As to what prompted me to visit the website, the CDC latest change in guidance. Originally, I avoided getting the covid shots due to long distrust of big pharma and the US for profit medicine. My mom was an RN who worked when health care was still affordable, and “non-profit” in many ways. In the end, her health was ruined by medical incompetence.
As a 66 year old working full time, I could have gotten the shot in January. I passed. And kept passing until the delta variant arrived in my area in late May. By late June, we were getting walloped. The hospitals were overwhelmed. Patients were transferred, traveling nurses brought in, paramedic teams brought in. Local ambulances couldn’t keep up. Delta appeared to be nastier than the original variant.
I couldn’t bear the thought of getting sick enough to require care and adding to the HCWs burden. The only preventative available was the shot, so I got the J&J, and a second in the fall.
Now I knew at the time the reason the local health care systems were cracking under the pressure was they had been spreading staff thin to max profits for years. Of course, both claim to be non-profit, so that money gets ploughed into more clinics, buildings, glossy marketing, and I suspect bonuses for upper level management. Still felt I should do what I could to avoid adding to the workers’ burden myself.
I now feel like an absolute idiot who allowed myself to be played. I should have stuck with my initial instinct, but damn I am still pissed at a whole lot of people.
Interestingly, every body in my office, Pfizer vaxxed and boosted caught omicron in the winter. Some have had it twice. So far, I have not had it. I suspect it is pure dumb luck, not the J&J shots. Not a good look for the effectiveness of Pfizer though.
Good luck to all of us. More interesting times are surely headed our way this fall.
(PS--I was emme at JPR, so hello to any of you reading. I hope Nevada Wino is recovering nicely from her broken arm.😊)
I've my own personal reason, tied in to Biden's massive lie in his February 4 speech: "Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy." You can add to that "The United States should not, and will not, engage in “forever wars” that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars." It's from Biden's INTERIM NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGIC GUIDANCE dated March 2021.
Why does it matter? My wife and daughter are two of the 10 million or so refugees from Ukraine; we married in Ukraine last December and quickly had to spend months working through Biden's "welcome with open arms" paperwork and costs to get them here. Friends are some of the estimated 190,000 killed and wounded in Ukraine, and while their building is still standing in central Ukraine, we don't know how long that will last.
Biden, and Obama/Biden, had a chance to follow through with diplomacy with the Minsk accords from 2014/2015, unanimously ratified by the UN Security Council and agreed to by the US. Instead, Biden as President chose to massively arm one side of a civil war, and impose sanctions on Russia that instead are destroying Europe and have negative impacts on those living in the US.
I know we've had this discussion elsewhere, but Biden is in my mind the worst President in US history, and is now in strong competition for the worst leader in world history. His war of choice is responsible for the destruction of Ukraine physically and economically with unlimited weapons supplies to fight to the last Ukrainian, and is moving inexorably closer to WW III and possibly nuclear war. Biden's choices may destroy the West and the US - he now has his forever war that may cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to the West.
I just hope it doesn't go nuclear and end up costing billions of lives.