Bye Bye Miss American Pie

By Distributorcap

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not religious, that I do not believe in any sort of afterlife and that if there was a God, he would have found another planet to oversee a long time ago.

But in that mix of atheism, agnosticism, apathy and doubt, I do believe that a society (as opposed to just one person) is judged by how it treats the various members of that said society. Being that no society since the dawn of civilization (a term used very loosely) has even been so homogeneous to include just the privileged - that judgment will almost always manifest itself in how the weakest are acknowledged and cared for.

"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."
-- Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds [1954].

"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."
-- Samuel Johnson, Boswell: Life of Johnson

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."
-- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity [1877].

"...the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped."
-- last speech of Hubert H. Humphrey [November 1977]

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man"
-- Mahatma Gandhi 

The above quotes highlight five groups from which any society will be ultimately be judged based on how they are treated and integrated (in no particular order):

1. Children
2. Elderly
3. Sick & Handicapped
4. Needy & Poor
5. Animals

Somewhere in the past 234 years we have come to believe that anyone who was weak and could not stand up for themselves was really a just a parasite and cancer on society. (I will go out on a limb at date the inception of that philosophy to January 20, 1981).

As spokesperson from the any of the 5 groups above will tell you - America in 2010 has failed or is failing on all five. If you are a rich white person with good health - you probably do not have a lot to complain about. But based on how our business, spiritual and political leaders have acted during the past 30 years, Judgment Day is not looking like a July 4th Celebration.

Again, anyone who knows me knows how cynical I have become about this great American Society. I have some very strong doubts about this country's long-term survival as a union of 50 states. The glue that holds a society together - a common bond for the good of all its citizens, a national purpose to better the entire society, and a way for those on the outside to be welcome on the inside - has come undone.

As things turned sour, instead of looking to ourselves for solutions (which ultimately means acknowledging mistakes), many Americans began to turn its back on the 5 groups above. The most hated group in the US today is not minorities, not immigrants, not gays, not Palin-worshippers, not atheists, and not doves - but the poor (although a disproportionate amount of the poor are minorities and immigrants).

The anger toward health care reform, the hateful talk about those collecting unemployment insurance, the indifference towards the ecological disaster in the gulf (the only disaster talked incessantly about on the right is the economic disaster, not the ecological), the trauma in passing S-CHIP, the resentment at immigrants (legal as well as legal), privitization talk about Social Security, the continuing choice of guns over butter - all prove beyond a shadow of a doubt how much this country hates poor people.

After all poor people are nothing more than a drain on society. For every dollar they contribute, they are pulling $3-$4 dollar out of the our pockets. The government is nothing more than a cash register for the needy. These are people who do nothing and would rather lie around watching American Idol than earn $7.15 an hour flipping burgers or unpacking crap made in China. Hard-luck stories or event beyond their control (like shipping jobs over to China to make the crap they don't want to unpack) mean nothing. Anyone on the government dole is a tumor that needs a strong dose of chemo.

If you read between the lines of Beck, Palin, Hannity, Limbaugh and especially the teabaggers - shipping these leaches off to a place like Poorschwitz would make this a better place - there would ultimately be more for society's most productive members.

Since hating the poor is not socially acceptable, Palin and the teabaggers have disguised their hate towards society's bloodsuckers with resentment towards groups that have virtually no voice and practically zero allies - immigrants, animals and the infirmed.

I really wonder how long any society can stay together when the commonality is rejection and hate as opposed to inclusion and betterment. And exactly who are Palin and Limbaugh going to hate when they get rid of the poor.

With the mass mainstream media continuing to drive the narrative that paranoia is the panacea ("how can the world hate us? but since the world does hate us, we just have to destroy everything that is making our lives so miserable) sure as I am sitting at this kepboard - you can expect that the threads that hold America together will continue to come undone - and the 5 groups that reside near the bottom of the ladder will suffer the most.

Why did I pick 1/20/81 as the day the music died?

"What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, [are there] by choice."
-- Ronald Reagan [1984]