I’m a Progressive. I believe in Democracy. I believe we’re authorized to make this country into a nation that puts people before wealth, and wealth into action to create a just and fair life for all Americans. Am I a Socialist? That depends on what you think a Socialist is. My Socialism is democratic as we have now in the U.S., the government, which is really you and me, voting for people to protect and defend our civil liberties, guarantee and promote our general welfare and ensure to defend out nation from all enemies foreign and domestic.
As a Democratic Social Progressive, I believe it is our right and our duty as a nation and as citizens to continue to advance the ideals of Democracy including that advancement of the human species in every way possible. I am a capitalist, but I don’t support a completely free and unfettered market. Capitalism works for businesses, but I don’t think it works for all people. I believe Capitalism should and can work for all people, but like so many other avenues in life, without rules, most things devolve into chaos and winners and losers.
For many people who look at competition as the reason for living, I’m sure the idea that everyone winning is insane and ridiculous. I get that. I was born here. I have lived within that economic paradigm my entire life. The problem is, we live in a time period and perhaps it’s just a human trait to think we should all be the same. I’m not a fan of competition for the sake of winning. Some people will always win and some will always lose. The question that came to me one day years ago was this. Why does anyone have to win or lose?
In sports or games of any kind, I’m all for winning and losing. But I think back to when I was a child and played baseball. We had Tee Ball, a Minor League, Little and Pony League. Each one was based on the age and size of the kids who signed up to play. I played baseball. I pitched, I was a catcher, third base, and the outfield. The thing is, baseball was, and I’d assume still is, based on the size and age of kids. Why? Some kids are smaller and would quite possibly get hurt playing against larger, stronger kids. I think the truth is, we want everyone to have a chance to win and little kids aren’t going to win against bigger kids. A 14-year-old six-foot-tall boy pitching to a 10-year-old boy 4 foot 10 inches is likely to have such an advantage as to remove the actual competitive nature of the game. So we Socialize games for our children.
So why do we not continue that into our adult lives? I think it’s the idea that we supposedly, though it’s not at all true, have the same opportunities to achieve the same things in life. That’s what I’ve always heard from the more business and capitalistic minded people I’ve known. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t like money or want wealth, I do. Maybe more than you do, but I just believe in fair play. Some people are born wealthy and don’t have to earn it, others are born poor and become wealthy, but most are born middle class and follow a path to a moderate income that leads them to wealth.
Education is the key to wealth for those not born into wealth or with an overwhelming drive to succeed. Public schools have been a great thing for the American people, but there are those who don’t accept that their children should be educated in public schools. They decry the limits and failures of the schools of the masses. I believe that public schools and universities are the keys to American prosperity. A shared education system to is not only diverse in its attendees and faculty but in its educational practices in order to reach as many students as possible.
Education is something I lack. I didn’t get one. I’m embarrassed to even talk about my schooling. Is it because it was a public school? No. It’s because I had something wrong with me. I have a learning disability, and then I suffered a life-altering brain injury. Am I able to think? Yes. I hope so at least. For me, school wasn’t just a challenge, is was an obstacle course designed for people who are different than me. That’s the problem. There is a segment of our population that doesn’t like or want to live among people who are different than themselves. It’s not just their looks or ancestry it’s also about the way people think and do things. Some people live their life comparing others to themselves and judging them based on how they live their own lives, rather than understanding and accepting that other people aren’t the same. These people tend to want to have everything their way because to them it makes the most sense. They’ll call it common sense. Is it really common sense to want everything static, stale and uniform and consistently unchanging? Maybe a little. We want a familiar standard so we can do other things instead of focusing on the minutia. But conformity in and of itself doesn’t guarantee that and is not flexible which is what education needs to be. Without flexibility, children, people get left behind, forgotten and lost in the minutia of the masses.
Education leads to success. Now I’m going to drop this bomb openly and unequivocally. I believe that the wealthy and highly competitive people among us don’t want health care or education as a right, or wages and decent working hours and conditions or benefits because they want a cheap and almost stupid working class they can push around. They want a return to a time when businesses had no responsibilities to their labor, and I think a lot of them if they could get away with it, would be happy to return to slavery or indentured servitude. Since Ronald Reagan became president., we’ve moved steadily down a road heading toward a return to that bygone era when people were supposed to be grateful the businessman “gave” them a job, “gave’ them a raise, “gave” them a promotion and so on. The rise of Unions paved a way for the American worker, who happens to be an equal citizen to the CEO or business owner, to make demands. Unions showed employers that without employees, businesses would close. Union busting has all but taken away the Union’s power, destroying any effectual impact on today’s economy.
Health Care is the next step in that journey. A single payer health system would lower the cost of insurance premiums across the board, there would be no more Health Insurance. My doctor has already stopped taking insurance. The cost of health care could be controlled. I’m not sorry to the doctors or wannabe’s trying to get rich from the health care industry, I’m taking the profit away and the excessively high wages. I’ve never read and study nor heard of one that proves that competition improves health care in America. I’ve heard CEOs and Republicans claiming without profit there will be no incentive to innovate. That’s why we need to remove profit from Health Care, Education, Law Enforcement, Military and Government Contracting, we need people in those places who are in it because it’s the right thing to do. Yes, I’m speaking of altruism.
If you want to get rich, become a stockbroker, a banker, a professional athlete, a movie star, an engineer working with private business.
Here’s what’s convincing to me about my philosophies. Let’s take a look at defense contractors, private prisons, and road and infrastructure contractors. Here in my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas the city council, quite a few years ago, hired Waste Management to pick up our garbage. In doing so they said they would save the city lots of money. They also fired our garbage collectors. Those people had been city employees and received the same benefits packages as other city employees. That’s played off as business and a good deal for the city, but what it really is corporate socialism and profiteering of the tax payers money. Anything the government pays private companies to do is socialism. I don’t hear too many if any, Republicans clambering to end that practice. Yet they want to prevent “We the People” from receiving that same special treatment.
That’s the real point. Conservatives seem to have a real issue with the idea of giving anyone “Special Treatment”, especially if they are too different from them. The thing is, we have a right to give ourselves any special treatment we desire. To me, that’s the real issue. We the people own the candy store. We don’t have to ask permission to have special treatment. That’s what the founding fathers were doing. They wanted special treatment by King George, he wouldn’t assent, and so the Founding Fathers ascended. They Declared that it is our natural born right to self-determination. Conservatives are like the chaperone at a party for adults. They have no authority to tell anyone what to do, but they think they do.
Our money is only good because Congress says it’s good. If Congress decided tomorrow that the money in circulation wasn’t worth anything, we’d all be broke and have to go to the barter system. We have the wealth in this country to allow everyone to live a good life. By giving everyone a great education and making sure they are well cared for and healthy, we create opportunities to live a good life of abundance. It’s those who aren’t really interested in wealth, but power, who are the true enemy of our Democracy. Those who want to control the lives of others while pulling strings as though they are playing a game, they are leading us into a new world order of fascism and oligarchy to rival the most heinous of empires.
My hope is to move away from a domestically financially competitive government, to a lifestyle form of government. One that’s run based on how well the poorest of us are doing, as we ensure they aren’t impoverished. Such an economy and Government would serve us all.
It’s not that I want to end competition, but everyday life shouldn’t revolve around competition for knowledge and well-being. The government shouldn’t be a business welfare it should be looking after the welfare of citizens, that’s us looking after each other. It’s going to be a difficult task if that’s ever going to happen, but I have a feeling that those 92 million people who didn’t vote in 2019 might just be the ones who take us to that next evolution in humanity, the one that we chose to be humane to each other because it’s the right thing to do.