Alas, Babylon
by Tom Sullivan
Daniel 5:27 (KJV)
TEKEL, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
This morning the estimable teacherken weighs his leaders in the balances and finds them wanting. Having watched the release of the torture report this week and the budget vote in the House last night, he is sickened:
Tom Harkin is supposed to be a Liberal. Then why in Hell has he moved to pay off education loan lenders by cutting funding for Pell Grants?
If Obama is opposed to torture, why are not there criminal investigations of the CIA, starting with the destruction of the waterboarding tapes, a destruction that was NOT properly authorized even within the CIA?
If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House is in theory committed to the environment, why agree to a bill that slashes even further funding for environmental initiatives?
If this administration and the Democratic leadership of the House believes in real fiscal responsibility, why agree to a bill that slashes the enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service?
I refuse to watch TV right now.
If the Liberal and Progressive Senators will not filibuster this bill, then they have succumbed to the terrorism of Wall Street and the Tea Party. The Republicans not only take hostages, they get Democrats to acquiesce in their slaughter.
You have to wonder how much longer oligarchs can continue to strip America to the walls to enrich themselves before the walls collapse on them. Wikipedia's explanation of "the hand writing on the wall" from the Book of Daniel is a negative event "easily predictable based on the current situation." Teacherken wonders whether we are seeing "the last gasp of an Ancien Regime before the guillotines made their appearance."
This week we watched good, "churchgoing" neighbors defend morally abhorrent, clearly illegal practices contrary to everything they learned at their parents' knees and everything their faith declaims. We watched as politicians and "good men of business" voted for relaxed rules that Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned will guarantee more bank failures requiring taxpayer bailouts of the very same banks We the People bailed out last time. Whatever happened to moral hazard? teacherken wonders.
But I wonder something else. What are the long-term effects on the psyche of spending 40-60 hours per week for decades on end working within an economic system that values the interests of amoral artificial persons above those of flesh-and-blood ones? Has anyone done a study on that? (Not that anyone of means would pay for it.) Do we really think a few hours in church each week provide a counterbalance? I submit instead we are breeding "persons" who would sell you the air you breathe if they could control how it gets to your nose. And if you cannot afford to buy “their” air? You should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more.
"The thing is," Ken says of events this week, "when I get sickened I get determined."
Cynics find it easy to sit on the sidelines and not get their nice, white vinyl souls besmirched by contact with either of the major parties. When such people ask why I do what I do, I tell them if I'm not in the fight I feel like roadkill. And I don't like feeling like roadkill. I may still get run over, but I don't feel like roadkill. Not terribly idealistic, but there it is.
I used to be a victim. I'm not anymore.