2018-2020: REMEMBERING, BECAUSE WE SHOULD
1941
The “Great” Depression was over, its only greatness the vast numbers
of innocent bystanders its perpetrators had robbed and impoverished across America.
Slowly, with much greater fortitude and suffering, we climbed back up,
creating safeguards against the wrongs that had caused it, in the
never ending struggle against greed and power, and control over others.
We did it because we should.
1945
The war was over. We won, because we knew
that Justice and Freedom and Truth and Right were with us
in the never ending struggle against greed and power, and control over others.
This too we did because we should.
1946-1979
Safeguards firmly in place against greed and power and control over others,
we prospered, and grew, and bought our own homes and sent our children to college
and traded for new cars and laid by for retirement and saved nest eggs. Life was good…
…for thirty-three years. An Age of Greatness enjoyed because we could.
1980
Greed and lust for power slipped back in, unnoticed, riding a harebrained economic idea
guaranteed to restore inequality and control, ie: If you deeply cut taxes on the richest few,
those rich will generously initiate new jobs, which will produce new goods and services,
which consumer masses will rush to buy, buy, buy, urged on by ads, ads, ads, and then…
vast new wealth will accrue to just everyone tra-la, generating more taxes than before,
and trickle right on down to the uppity middle classes, and to “those poor people,”
like spatter on a chicken house floor, oh my. Such nutty supply-side gospel, but
Great Reagan and his minions believed.
1981-2006
Years of slow motion loss. Distracted, We forfeited societal insurance, our equality glue.
Distracted – by guns, abortion, migrants – a dozen hot buttons and more.
Dancing and disunited, We voted passions while controllers pursued their one true goal:
Unlimited Wealth, and Power, and Control Over Others.
Impassioned – distracted – WE let our safeguards be frittered away.
Savings & loan collapse; dot.com bubble; Glass-Stiegel at last. Count the mergers.
Competition monopolized. Corporate “people.” Multinational capitalism without loyalty.
U.S. poverty: 1977 = 25 million (11.6%); 2017 = 46 million (15.1%). Forty years.
Just forty years of Laffer-curve Friedman-Reagan supply-side Economics of Ruin, or how
to scuttle a Grand Five-Masted Ship of State and greatest idea in the history of the world.
2007-08
The “Great” Subprime Mortgage collapse, worst since The “Great” Depression,
caused by Wall Street speculators. Too-big-to-fail taxpayer bailout. Again.
Our Age of Greatness truly dead and gone, its descendants the vast numbers
of formerly comfortable innocent bystanders, formerly middle class,
robbed and impoverished by insider Wall Street bright boys,
selling derivatives with lies – just because they could.
1980-2015
A new generation of short-memoried younglings, unknowingly circumscribed
by fast-food jobs. Poverty, homelessness, drugs and anguish grow anew,
paced by deceptive new financial instruments, and lies. They are growing still,
selling, selling, the same bundled now-rental homes they foreclosed after 2008.
The long view: up from slavery, serfdom…then trending back down again.
Will Americans never get it? Economics is politics’ evil twin.
2016
A new reactionary dark night of America’s soul. Narcissus and His Minions
Lusting, lusting, with greed Greed, for power Power…and Control Over Others,
closed utterly of Mindset in blind Rightness, Right Worship of The Harebrained Idea,
berserker divisiveness amok. Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears…
…in aspiration of fellowship, that and that alone – to form a more perfect union unachieved.
2018, Tuesday, November 6
We voted the dramatic turnarounds because we should, and by God we could.
Every progressive and her grandfather had become civically engaged, like never before.
2020, Tuesday, November 3
The long nightmare of unharnessed greed and power and control over others
ended, still complaining, in a landslide the likes of which had not been seen before.
Democracy reclaimed. As in those compassionate old New Deal years, We The People
then revolutionized our economic system, only more so, because finally we understood:
Political Freedom is meaningless unless you first have Economic Rights,
and a Living Income, and a Fair Share in the American Dream.
We remember. In 2020 we’ll do it because We Should.
©
