Let's Have a Little Class War - Join the Army for Equality

At numerous times in the United States history the poor have exited their hovels roaring a call for a better deal.  Going back to before the Civil War American Labor called out for a fair deal.  In 1834 Mill Girls struck for better conditions in Lowell, Massachusetts.  The next year workers in Philadelphia struck and won a 10 hour day.  Slaves and their free cohorts in the abolition movement called for treatment as humans, not property.  That brought us the 13th Amendment to our constitution in 1869.  In all these times the class of wealth and power resisted change.  The class of want and hunger forced improvements in living standards through class action.  These actions were not precipitated by intellectuals, but were a result of periods of neglect of the poor by those who had wealth and power.

One of those neglectful periods is upon us now.  The rich have, over the last 35 years, taken their share and the share that should have accrued to the poorest.  They have manipulated politicians and judges to allow them to reduce the power of the bottom tiers of society and to add to that insult they have priced most of us out of the schools that we, as taxpayers, have paid for.  The argument you hear from those in power is simply that it isn't their job to coddle the masses, that if we worked hard we too could be rich and comfortable.  Of course, you and I know that we work as hard or harder than they and our IQs aren't much different.  The difference, as I see it, is the difference that wealth makes in access to power.

What the rich don't have is numbers.  Ninety percent of the population is not rich and if that 90% should speak up what a noise that would be.  A new class battle could bring great change for all of us.

The rich now spend less on providing for the common good than you and I do and could be required to prove their good citizenship by upping their share of the tax burden.  We might all benefit if we reduced the voting power of corporations by reversing the Supreme Courts "Citizens United" decision.  Even better, if we shout loud enough, we might require public financing for all elections.  An enlightened electorate might even require that minimum standards in wage and working conditions apply to all workers.  The list of things an active and noisy lower class could do is only limited by the amount of activity and noise they produce.

Those in government and in corporate media have cried out at the very thought of Class Warfare.  I understand their fear.  Oddly they think of themselves as being members, or at least fellow travelers, of the Upper Class.  In a more egalitarian society that would not cause fear.  A society with our level of inequity leaves those who apologize for the rich open to criticism.  They need to rethink this attitude just in case the poor do decide to act.

 As a firm believer in nonviolence I hope that our actions can remain within the bounds of what Gandhi and Dr. King envisioned.  I can't say that I don't think the Upper Class deserves a little slapping around.  I just think that nonviolence produces results with less blood shed.  This is; however, a real war - most of the casualties are poor, dead of malnutrition or street violence or rotting away in prisons.  Those of us not living in abject poverty, find our lives diminished by a degraded environment caused by unbridled manufacturers or our wealth stolen by government sponsored inflationary schemes or bankers foreclosure practices.  Those who look for knowledge to pull them up, find the cost prohibitive.  Only the rich can afford many of our elite universities.

I call on all of the so called underclass to become members of the Army for Equality.  We must be loud in our demands and implacable in our resolve.  We must require our fair portion of our countries wealth.  Those who labor must be compensated fairly for the work they do.  Labor has as much right to the value of their products as does Capital.  If Capital fails to understand that principal, let them produce  without Labors help.  This war requires no large troop movements or the help of heroic generals.  Small groups of like minded people can make large changes.  Organized response to the problem at hand has changed the world in the past.  The Army for Equality in all it's gorilla majesty will do for the future - if we just join.

"The Rich Are Not Like You and Me"

The quote above is from F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It comes to mind because of a Facebook chat I had recently.  It was started by a legislator's lament of the impasse on Washington State Budget negotiations.

Some joined the lament at lack of progress.  Others had suggestions for change or ideas for ways to break the impasse.  One person thought that we really need to find more ways to spend less and used Heritage Foundation statistics to plead his case.  This trusty Radical; however, has seen the results of the last fifty years of getting by with less.

Washington State's Constitution mandates that the prime role of state government is to provide adequate  education for all the state's children.  The Washington Supreme Court ruled recently that we had fallen 2 Billion Dollars short of fulfilling that role.  If that doesn't convince you, my own children had to suffer through the school year in a school so dilapidated that plaster fell from the ceiling and a child was wounded by a clock that didn't stay on the classroom wall.  That school had the misfortune of being in a district made up of retirees and the working poor.  We moved to a richer district, but not everyone has that option.

I bring all this up because a lot of recent research and polling data backs up Fitzgerald's contention.  The rich graduate from High School and College at much higher rates than the poor.  15% of the lower class graduate college vs over half of the upper class.  The upper class thinks differently about many things.  They are less charitable than the poor giving 1.3% of their wealth to charity while the poorest give at more than twice the rate, 3.2%  These statistics from  The Atlantic.  There is also new research that tells us that the rich don't find legal restrictions binding on them.  They feel that greed is good and don't believe that others are as deserving as they are according to these studies.

I really don't know how to reform the rich.  It may not even be important, if we can get the 90% of Washingtonians and for that matter the other not so rich Americans to vote for progress instead of for less is better.

A Belated Response to Fathers Day

I theorize that our response to Fathers and Fathers Day is usually personal and visceral,  I know mine is.  My own father was a looming presence in the living room and a frowning menace at the dinner table for the first thirteen years of my life.  After removing himself from the lives of his five children, he became an occasional support check and a reminder that his young girlfriend was more important than those children or their lives.

It's not that I learned nothing from Dad.  He and I learned animal husbandry and farm work together, raising chickens and goats and a lot of garden dust.  He was a good Scout Leader and wilderness guide for all of us.  He was politically active and his children have kept that legacy.  We also learned that if you needed succor, he just didn't have it in him.  That's what Mom was for, Dad just wasn't warm and huggable.  He was; however, a thinker and an intelligent man.  I thank him for teaching his children how to think and to be introspective.

That habit of introspection became immensely important to me as a father.  If you only react to the  needs of the day, your children may be fat and happy, but you and they will ultimately fail at life.  I have had the great pleasure and annoyance that comes with having children who are intellectually my equal or maybe even my superior.  Without the advantage of introspection and forethought, they'd have run amuck and I'd have run screaming.  Luckily for parents, children's brains don't grow up as fast as their bodies.  You can sometimes get ahead of them.

There is in the modern model of fathers a disturbing trend.  Many fathers don't seem to understand the need for ongoing commitment to the process of fathering.  Just as children grow physically for the first eighteen years and mature emotionally for several years past that, parents must remain engaged in the process for at least that long.  It seems to me implicit in the sex act that genetic combination and  new life may ensue.  If that's true, someone must be bound to ensure the viability of that new life - that new genetic combination of he and she, our culture requires that both parents be so bound.  Men you can't pretend that you have no interest here, after all half the genes are yours.  Not only are you required by the laws of nature to protect your genetic heritage, but the cultural norms and laws of your state and country require it as well.

My Father like many others chafed at the need to go on husbanding the children of his first marriage after he remarried and Fathered two more.  I can sympathize with the difficulty of his task.  He chose to  father seven children and I can only suppose that he had the forethought to know the cost of spreading his genes so widely.  If he failed to understand these costs, perhaps his IQ was not quite as high as was recorded?

I have had the privilege of paying to protect the genetic heritage of profligate fathering.  I would have preferred that the fathers at least acknowledged their debt.  Since they haven't, I have felt free to count their genetic contributions as gifts to Clan MacKenzie.  I have not felt aggrieved at being able to raise so many fine humans to adulthood.  I bask in their reflected achievements and am content.

I have heard from some Fathers that the reason that they don't help more in husbanding is that their (the children's) Mother is a bitch or a whore or you name it.  Well there you go, that's perfectly logical.  If you don't like some adult who you mixed genes with that's a perfect excuse to starve or ignore your genetic descendants.

The reality of parenting's difficulty is hard to ignore.  Parents, Fathers and Mothers, give up much to raise children.  Our parents, our schools, our society all fail to prepare us for the work necessary to raise children.  That said, there is no reason we shouldn't give our best effort.  Remember, these are your own genes you are saving from oblivion.  Even if the genes aren't yours, growing up children is eminently satisfying and you can always add them to the clan.

Guns Really Do Kill People

More die from gun violence than auto accidents

Current statistics from thirteen states show a disturbing trend.  More people in these states have been killed by guns than by cars.  The proof is right in front of us.  We drive hundreds of hours a year and we fondle our guns much less and kill more with them.  Perhaps because we build our cars for safety, realizing that they are inherently dangerous, we are able to reduce the numbers of fatalities.  The silly idea that guns, which are designed for killing, might be less dangerous, is just plain preposterous.

“The contrast to our nation's shameful response to the public health crisis of gun violence could not be more stark. We've done virtually nothing to address the issue nationally, even as the death toll continues to mount. Here are the 13 jurisdictions where gun deaths outpaced motor vehicle deaths in 2010 (data is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control):

Alaska: 144 gun deaths, 71 motor vehicle deaths
Arizona: 931 gun deaths, 795 motor vehicle deaths
Colorado: 555 gun deaths, 487 motor vehicle deaths
District of Columbia: 99 gun deaths, 38 motor vehicle deaths
Illinois: 1,064 gun deaths, 1,042 motor vehicle deaths
Louisiana: 864 gun deaths, 722 motor vehicle deaths
Maryland: 538 gun deaths, 514 motor vehicle deaths
Michigan: 1,076 gun deaths, 1,063 motor vehicle deaths
Nevada: 395 gun deaths, 289 motor vehicle deaths
Oregon: 458 gun deaths, 324 motor vehicle deaths
Utah: 314 gun deaths, 274 motor vehicle deaths
Virginia: 875 gun deaths, 728 motor vehicle deaths
Washington: 609 gun deaths, 554 motor vehicle deaths”
(The above is quoted from Huffington Post - Josh Sugarmann: Guns Kill More People Than Motor Vehicles in 12 States & DC, check it out.)

The same study shows continual declines in motor vehicle deaths and an opposite trend for gun deaths for the same periods.  Don’t know about you, but I think that it’s past time for us to decide whether the current individualistic interpretation of The Constitution’s First Amendment is one we can all live with.  There are so many things we could do that would reduce gun deaths without impacting peoples right (if there is such) to own guns.  We could, for example, mandate proper locks and storage as part of the purchase price of guns.  As most agree, we could require real background checks and develop ways to remove guns from the hands of those who later lose their right to own guns through conviction of crime or mental illness.  It is even possible that an educated electorate might decide that hand guns are like teen drinking and driving and are just too dangerous to allow.

If nothing else we might decide to make the debate about safety.  It is not germane to make comments about “only criminals having guns”.  We all know that criminals are by definition not out to improve the general welfare.  Nor should our main emphasis be punishment.  We are after all trying for safety and how many gun owners would we need to jail to guarantee safety?  One thing we should do immediately is to repeal the law that keeps us from studying guns and violence.  Thanks to The National Rifle Association (NRA) there are almost no current studies of the hows and whys of gun violence.  What I am sure of is that there are a multitude of people who have thought about the problem and that there are multiple ways to make us all safer.