A Forum for the New World Order

Hon. Senator Bennett,

I’m grateful for your service to our country. Thank you.

I was personally thrilled at the prospect of our senators working together to pass an economic stimulus package. Now, my hopes have been dashed and I can barely stand to tune in. Americans were very excited about the swiftness with which President Obama pledged to pass the Recovery Act, because we lose hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. By stalling, we’re getting the clear message that the senate doesn’t care about those lost jobs. And by some Senators pledging to vote against stimulus, we’re getting the message that some members of congress want America to fail. This is extremely disheartening, and I don’t think I’m the only member of your constituency losing her patience with this partisanship.

And when you lose our patience, you lose our respect. Keep in mind Barack Obama’s still lofty approval ratings when you vote against it. Eyes will only turn to you if you vote against public interest and in favor of your own political interest. And the gaze won’t be favorable.

Sincerely,
Tracey Bushman

It’s more honest to address economic ebb-and-flow when we recognize whole swaths of individuals that participate in neither: the poor.

Of course the policy makers are running around like headless chickens to stimulate the economy. The prospect of poverty now touches more than America’s untouchables. It must boggle the minds of the poor that it took the collapse of the middle class for the government to take notice of poverty. And it must not hearten anyone at the bottom to realize that economic recovery proposals tend only to target the middle class.

Most politicians would be satiated in realizing the recovery of the middle class alone. Because some politicians think so small as to ignore the systemic nature of their decisions and confine policy to those matters directly affecting their voting constituency. After all, homeless people don’t vote, right? And Neocons have worked hard to see that minorities don’t vote. And super-capitalism has saddled the working poor with enough of a survival obstacle course to ensure they will have no time to commit to any political participation whatsoever.

For too many Americans, recession is a way of life, chronically. Why is it any more unthinkable for middle-classers to join the ranks of the poor? Who is truly losing in what we’ve only now brought ourselves to call a recession? Isn’t poverty a signal that our society never really “won” in the first place? Only now can’t we tell whether the guy sleeping on a park bench once traded on Wall Street or is one we previously wrote off as lazy. Only now do we recognize the peril in assuming people who can’t work won’t work.

Poverty is a plague on our society, and we’re now aware of its cost to the economy. Now, imagine what kind of “boom” we could experience in an economy bereft of it.

Not only is sustainable agriculture more economically and socially sound long-term, failure to empathize with our fellow animals weighs on the human race’s prospect for a sustainable future on our one and only planet. No one has offered mankind a more reasoned approach to the challenges of large-scale contemporary livestock farming than Temple Grandin. She is a realist: agribusiness is here to stay. It’s unreasonable to expect a widespread conversion to vegetarianism, and it’s unthinkable to enslave animals in the ways we’ve seen all too often in factory farming. With all of that in mind, and in the context of the ethical treatment of animals, we are duty-bound to design better systems to ensure the livelihood of those animals we raise for food. And, for some reason, we’ve been heretofore unable to address these problems adequately without the wisdom from someone like her. Someone with autism.

For years, journalists have picked her brain for clues on how we may all better understand our fellow animals. What strikes me each time is the common-sense solutions she gives on such designs as non-slip flooring in slaughter houses. Anyone could surmise that the feeling in slaughterhouse air must be frightening for an animal. Add to that some stressful events like slippage and shouting herders and you’ve got what amounts to a terrifying end-of-life experience for these animals.

Regarding shouting, Grandin stressed in a recent interview on NPR (link needed) that “first of all, we need to get everyone to calm down.” Anyone with a house-pet knows the effect a stressful environment has for their beloved animal. Imagine the discussion of implementing calm handling at feed lots and slaughter houses turning to the catalyst for their stress-levels in the first place. Maybe factory farming is stressful for animal and human alike. Maybe that dialog would then lead to the discussion of the true cost of cost-cutting in the farm industry.

Maybe since autistic individuals tend toward honesty, a society could rely on them to point out problems in the system before anyone else even notices the problems. How much more could we learn if we focused not on some “cure” for autism, but on ways to foster the very special, and sometimes very specialized, talents that appear to be the hallmark of this “disorder”? We’ve effectively proven that “normal” psychology is not the definitive mindset in addressing to the problems we face: we wage war on everything, imprison animals and humans with impunity, destroy our planet, etc. Are these really the traits we want to recognize as “normal”?

Here I am, on the eve of what I’ve been awaiting for for the last few months, if not my entire life, and I don’t feel it. I’ve lost whatever muse drove me here. I’m thinking pills again. I don’t wanna feel this. I’m crashing.

My brain’s made up of chemicals. My pills activated my chemicals. They bypassed whatever triggered my chemical dysfunction, but they let me feel again. And when that stopped working, I thought “well, that was nice while it lasted”, and deteriorated.

I saw Obama televised in 2004 at the DNC. I told nay-sayers he would be our next president. I was told to stop thinking such nonsense. So I took that crazy idea and put it away along with all of my other dashed hopes. Pills took care of the hole once occupied by hope.

I didn’t watch the news after Katrina. The president is a narcissist. He believes his own lies. He kills and tortures. And we put him there to rape our country. I’ve known the certifiably insane. I know hopeless when I see it. I know their techniques for overstepping reason and gaining allies. No reason left to fight. Nothing left to hope for. The Twin Towers were wired for controlled demolition. There, I said it.

Obama came back. It looked like he might win. There’s no way. Those psychopathic bastards will find some way to make sure we stay hopeless. But I remember remember on the 5th of November Matthews read my mind: “I want to help him succeed.”

I recognized the opening at the top of my brain as truth. I felt like a child. I crawled out, painfully, like a screaming baby: “this changes everything, everything, everything, everything”. I was drooling with wide-eyed, open-mouthed realization. I was seeing hope transformed into a shining futurescape. I exposed myself to it. I took off the clothes of my shame and stood in the middle of it. I wanted it to touch every cell in my body and consciousness. Because without my pills and without my clothes all I have is hope.

I saw my death and wasn’t afraid. I believed in Christ. I believed in myself again. I believed in my own brain, taking its place in a sea of brains; creating knowledge of a better way of being. I let go my knowledge of things like fear and shame and war and hate. I tuned to the frequency of space: our only hope for appreciating what we’ve squandered on Earth.

And people told me to get back in my hole. Well here I am. I didn’t even realize I had fallen. But I have. So, congratulations.

I’ll never know what caused my brain to turn on me this time. I’ll pretend to hope as long as I can. Until then, I leave it to Obama. I’m in awe of his strength against such odds.

Michael Moore hit the nail on the head in this interview with Larry King about the auto industry bailout:

And I mean those guys that were testifying today, one of — the Ford chairman is making something like $22 million a year and his company lost $2 billion last year. The G.M. chairman is making $15 million a year. His company lost $39 billion last year. And he’s rewarded with a $15 million payout.

I mean this is — this is just absolutely insane.

But I’ll tell you what it really has proven to me, Larry, is that these guys, after all of that stuff they’ve been telling us all these years about go capitalism, free market, free enterprise, they don’t believe in any of that.

They don’t believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want — they want socialism for themselves. They want a handout…

KING: Yes.

MOORE: …and a net for themselves. To hell with everybody else, but give it to them.

KING: As…

MOORE: And I think, really, what we’re seeing here right now with them, with the banks, we’re seeing the end of capitalism — the end of capitalism as we know it.

KING: Has…

MOORE: And I say good riddance.

KING: As Mel Brooks…

MOORE: It hasn’t helped the people or the planet.

KING: As Mel Brooks once classically said, where did we go right?

The rich have this view of poor people as a disease, and not knowing their take on disease, I can only assume their strategy is to ignore them and maybe they will go away. The homeless don’t make it on our census sheets. They’re not counted among the current unemployed. Their story has been untold for decades. Unfortunately that is nothing new.

Our “Free Market” social contract has been to agree on poverty as a casualty of a system skewed to protect corporations over individuals. The agreement gave the Middle class ammunition in their inevitable confrontation with poverty in their communities (assuming most Middle-classers can’t afford the upgrade to a gated community); the justification for dismissing the poor and homeless as lazy, drunk, or worse.

America’s Upper class now has more capital than any of us can even begin to wrap our heads around (Bernie Madoff just walked away from having to account for the $1,000,000, disguised as jewelry, he laundered to his family). What do they know about working for a living? What do they know about keeping a budget, making ends meet, or being self-made? It really is just easier to understand their economy in terms of an elite socialist niche, carved out for about 5% of Americans, under the guise of a “Free Market”.

Only the Middle class offers a realistic study on Capitalism as it’s been exalted. It’s the last group to walk the Capitalist line, follow the Capitalist rules, and prop up the Capitalist banks. This army marched long enough to spin their neighbor’s decline in the same way they spun poverty: to apply labels of laziness, drunkenness, and insanity in order not to empathize and potentially fall down with them. The Middle Class’s race to the bottom is marked by broken families, rising substance abuse, suicide, and a nice, stucco exterior.

Earth to Middle Class: Stop pretending you ever had an invitation to the American Capito-socialist orgy. Such an invitation comes with a shining, super-socialist safety net should you decide to run your own little Ponzi scheme. I don’t know about you guys, but my safety net is currently my Dad. What’s his?