Read an article by Carl Gibson the other day in which he states that we must set aside our divisive issues, like gun control and abortion, because they are only hypes that keep us divided and keep the real issue, corporate takeover of our government, from arriving at the principle position on the table.
Gibson’s right, and we are doing it, and have been doing it, for as long as I can remember. Interestingly enough, the media is so involved in this obfuscation that they must be considered fellow travelers with the corporate hierarchy.
Gibson quotes Warren Buffet, who acknowledges that we are engaged in class warfare and that his class is winning. This is absolutely true. We, as a country, are enmeshed in a huge class war, the one percent against the ninety nine percent and the one percent is winning, simply because they have more money. Our national government has been bought and paid for.
The oligarchs and plutocrats have influenced enough legislation so that they now control the tax code and in so doing, have opened a pathway to unlimited funding for any project they desire to carry out. They have bought and paid for legislation that allows their various companies to do with this nation, pretty much as they wish. They drill where they want, they pollute when they please, they rumble, almost unfettered, through private and public property at will. Sure we demonstrate, we march, we get arrested, we write irate columns like this but the 1% smile benevolently and carry on, doing what they want. Democracy is long gone.
This nation is not paralyzed by any inability of the right and left to agree on anything, although that isn’t helping much either. This country is paralyzed by fact that congress will not make any move that is not dictated by the men who have bought and paid for them. The members of congress are no longer free agents, they are tiny marionettes that dance at the fingertips of the puppet masters and regurgitate the lies that corporate royalty wants us to hear.
So what do we do? How do we get out from under the thumbs of the oligarchs? How do we regain the democracy that we have been bragging about for well over two hundred years but that we have let slip through our fingers?
The answer, of course, is revolution. There are two kinds of revolution and thanks to the greed of the gun manufacturers and their lobbyists we are, as a people, well equipped to carry out either kind. Of course only one kind makes sense and it isn’t the one that benefits from the lack of adequate gun control.
In the Sixties a generation of young and sometimes not so young people took to the streets to tell our government that we would no longer kill or die in an unjust war. It worked. Partly it worked because the Vietnam war was so senseless that even the powers that were, recognized its futility. It also worked because we were all involved in it. Our government had not yet recognized the negative consequences of forcing young men into the draft. Young women were, at that time, not drafted.
The draft was a demonstrable mistake in an unjust war and Nam was an unjust war. It wasn’t the end of our unjust wars but it was the end of the draft because in 1973 our government came to see that fighting unpopular or unjust wars with conscripted youth was a sure sign of political disaster. Now we fight with a “volunteer army.” What that means is that the war is only real to less than 1% of the country. Stay with me, I’m making a point here. There is a damned small percentage of our population that have actually been personally, if not financially, affected by the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s one of the main reasons why two such unjust, unfortunate wars have come to exist, why they lasted so long and why there has not been a far larger outcry against them.
This country becoming the “land of the rich and the home of the affluent,” is quite a different story. The transition from a middle class society with wealthy influences to a wealthy society with almost no middle class, has been accomplished. Now it’s time to reverse the situation. But it’s not going to be accomplished by the same people who stopped the Vietnam war. We are old and lacking in energy and we are the same people who allowed this untenable situation to come about. This time, just like last time, it will have to be those that have the most to lose, the youth of the country.
They are the ones who will have to decide that if they want the American dream they will have to fight for it because the rich aren’t going to let them have it any other way. If they want education, if they want jobs, if they want health care, if they want opportunity, they are going to have to fight for it every step of the way because the 1% have already proven that they care nothing for anyone but themselves. They have already proven that one yacht is not enough; even if children in Oklahoma haven’t enough to eat, even if children in Los Angeles can’t get a competitive education, even if kids in South Dakota can’t get adequate health care, they don’t care. One yacht is just not enough and it never will be as long as they can step on others to get the second.
It’s up to you, youth of America. You can take back what has been taken away from your parents and you can forge a new country based on old values, a country that has a place for you, a country where true democracy is once again the American way, a country where you are free to pursue the American dream.