One True Thing

You know, don’t thank me, but I’ll tell you one true thing. Call it a Christmas present. You don’t have to believe me, people believe all kinds of stupid things that are not true, and fail to believe many things that are manifestly true, so my confidence in people’s powers of discrimination regarding truth is generally low. But I’ll tell you one true thing, take it or leave it.

America is a Socialist country, and that’s a good thing.

It was not always thus. There was a time when Capitol could ruthlessly exploit Labor without fear of contradiction, the generations of my grandfathers and beyond. Want a job? Work for peanuts. Get crippled at work? Tough darts. Can’t work anymore? Live with your children. Got a terrible disease? Go bother somebody who gives a shit. The children of the Working Class were generally born at home, and two-out-of-three surviving the birth and the first year was a pretty good percentage. Records show that we are working our way back to that level of infant death, uninsured health tragedy, and adult poverty. Are you happy about that?

As so often happens in history, catastrophe intervened, catastrophes have done more to help the Working Class than any of the better loved events of history. This may be a second true thing, but the single greatest thing that ever happened to the Working Class was the Black Death, which freed laborers from virtual slavery and directly led to the Renaissance, an explosion of scientific knowledge, and the creation of a middle-class in Europe (with an assist to the printing press). In the case of Twentieth-Century America, the catastrophes were the Great Depression and World War II. Suddenly, Labor was very, very important, and workers, men, women, Black, White and Puerto Rican, so to speak, were critical to the continued existence of Capitol. Capitol responded with money, benefits and security, and government in the form of Franklin Delano Roosavelt and the New Deal (along with the Social Democrats in Europe) leveled the playing field, and a Socialist, Middle-Class version of Western Civilization, including America, was born (thank you, John Maynard Keynes).

All that peace and prosperity, back in the 1950’s and 1960’s and 1970’s, did you think it was an accident? Remember the Middle-Class America? Remember the LACK of income disparity? Remember Unions? Welfare as a right? Public housing? Do you love Social Security? and Medicare? Well, you should.

No, of course you don’t remember. The Reagan-Thatcher-Crypto-Fascist-Click dismantled a lot of it, and the behest of the Power Elite, yes, they exist, you are probably unwittingly doing their bidding right this second, at the instruction of their new generation of stooges.

It’s a long story, and other people tell it better than me. But in my lackadaisical, coaster style, here it is in a nutshell: Socialism is your salvation, you non-rich, non-genius, non-entrepreneurial, run-of-the-mill MF’s, you guys and girls just like me. It exists, and it’s good, and you discard it at your supreme peril.