A recent Newsweek cover had a blue hand and a red hand shaking with the headline “We’re All Socialists Now”. Someone I work with showed it to me because they found it hilarious. I said what’s going on in the country is not socialism and he disagreed because of the talk of nationalizing some of the banks. The conversation ended there, but I think if we had had the time and the inclination we could have had a pretty good argument. So I’m going to have my side now.
Just a mile from my home is a stretch of road where there are 7 different banks within a quarter mile radius. I could walk into any one of them and be turned down for a loan or have them laugh at me for wanting to open a savings account with my $23.69 in pennies I’ve saved in an old glass jar. And in each circumstance I would be dealing with a private enterprise. At no time would I have any interaction with a government official.
There are hundreds of doctors in my county that I could choose to go to for a checkup, a colonoscopy or a Steve McQueen chin and none of my money would be turned over to a government lackey.
Sorry to break this to you fearmongers and magazines looking to sell a few more copies in a bad economy, but we’re not socialists. America is still a capitalist country, unfortunately we are one that has been run into the ground by unfettered greed and an administration that burned its own eyes out with a red hot poker so they couldn’t see what was going on and only after it was too late tried to have back alley lasik surgery to reverse it and view what they had wrought.
I voted for Obama, not because of his cult of personality which I never bought into, but because McCain had become a caricature of himself and was a rudderless ship. I don’t know if Obama’s economic policies will work, but I have no problem with spreading the wealth around more.
Two things have happened very starkly in this country each year for the past decade: there are more billionaires and more people living below the poverty line. This is not the America I want to live in, where a select few get harvested and the rest of us die on the vine.
All you congressman and senators and pundits who think this is socialism and can’t wait to go on TV and say so, why don’t you instead shut the hell up, go back to your offices and actually do something to help this country. It seems to me that Obama is willing to listen to ideas and you don’t have any.
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I think one of the biggest problems in our country is the fearmongering that you mentioned. Too many people in ALL political parties think that they have all of the right answers to everything and cannot see that it takes all kinds of views to come up with answers, that often there isn't only one answer to a problem but several, and that whatever political parties are different from "yours" does not mean they are the devil's spawn. Stop the blame game and start looking for solutions together. Americans deserve leaders who are willing to back good solutions whether the idea was theirs or someone from the "other" party. I think that one of the best ways to BE right, which seems to be popular among politicians and pundits, is to accept that "your side" may not always have the right answer.
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