Here’s something to read. Being some smallish part of the “liberal blogosphere”, which makes me cringe, I have to admit that in terms of actually doing or accomplishing anything at all, I do indeed suck mightily. I engage in the equivalent of hiding on tall buildings in the war zone and tossing comfy pillows with bitchy messages on them at those I dislike. Written in really stinky marker with dirty words, but still, comfy pillows. I can’t even get up enough energy to make a stinking sign, and I have a printer here at work that will print out 24″ x 40 feet or so. I could churn out signs galore. But do I? Nah. I suck.
I know other people suck, but that’s not the point. Labor Day let me reflect a bit on the fact that there have been people in our country, in the whole world, who fought against corporate overlords and government oppressors to get a little slice of the pie for their families. They put their lives on the line and were quite often injured or killed by those same oppressors. From the Robber Barons to the current New Gilded Age, they stand up to fight the aristocrats. The founders knew that a permanent landed gentry is anathema to a democracy, and built in controls like the estate tax to help against the effects of massive wealth accumulation. The last 50 years of conservatism has been backlash to rebuild the royal class, and it’s worked. The next fifty years have to be all-out political effort to return those hard-fought gains to the worker, to the middle class, or democracy will disappear completely, even this sad shell that’s left right now.
So fight.