communism on the south end?
I been listening for the last year or more this growing drumbeat against public service employees, social security entitlements, health care run by the government and, well, damn near everything run by the government. You’d think teachers were communists and firemen were Marxists and anybody who wasn’t working for themselves or for a
corporation were leeches on the body public. We suddenly got ourselves a debt crisis and some folks believe the only
solution is to shrink government down to a size they can flush in a toilet.
I used to be a school teacher way back in the Paleolithic. And I don’t mean Sarah Paleolithic. I find it troubling that public employees are the bad guys now. That somehow they don’t contribute to the wealth of America. The Ayn Randians think the corporations are the only way to restore the nation to its former glory days, but I’m not sure what glory days they mean, although probably any time before last year would do.
We got a lot of folks out of work right now who can’t pay taxes if they don’t make a living. And we got a Congress with a lot of senators and representatives who want to cut government jobs some more. Because, I guess, they aren’t real jobs. Don’t pay real taxes. Don’t buy real groceries and cars and television sets. Don’t pay into social security. Don’t get loans or put their phony money in banks. I guess. These senators and representatives, it should be pointed out to them, don’t have real jobs either. And lately, most of us might at least agree on that point.
What I don’t understand, being a communist on the South End, is how we watched the banking industry and the Wall Street boys and the hedge fund managers and all the heroes of Ayn Rand take us down a subprime mortgage meltdown and nobody seems to think anyone is to blame but the government. Call me stoopid and paint a clown face on my hat, but something is terrible wrong with this picture. Something’s upside down and inside out and distorted like those old funhouse mirrors at the carnival. Why aren’t some people in jail for gaming the system? Why aren’t laws being passed to keep it from happening again?
I’m not a Bolshevik just because I want to lock up thieves who were supposed to be capitalist heroes, am I? I just want somebody to tell me how it is we think one job is more valid than another, why a private construction worker is more
important to the economy than a government construction worker the FAA laid off the last few weeks, why we should want a private agency security person instead of a municipal cop, why we think a corporation beholden to its investors is
more honest than an employee working for us, the people.
Course, I’ll have to admit, in full disclosure, most of us down here on the radical South End, aren’t too much interested in jobs. Any jobs. Work, I hate to admit, isn’t high on the value chart. And here’s something for the Sarah Paleontologists: you won’t find too many communists here either. Everybody’s supposed to work under communism. That isn’t gonna fly down here. We got a few better things to do than work. Maybe we should’ve run for the Senate.
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