A Die-Hard Republican who finally saw the light and left the Party of shame – The GOP!

How I finally left the Politics of Shame

 

I hated Government even though they were the only one trying to save me. Here is how one day I finally saw the light.

I was a 20-year-old college dropout with no more than $100 in the bank the day my son was born in 1994.  I’d been in the Coast Guard just over six months. Joining the service was my solution to a lot of problems, not the least of which was being married to a pregnant, 19-year-old fellow dropout.  We were poor, and my overwhelming response to poverty was a profound shame that drove me into the arms of the people least willing to help — conservatives.

 

Just before our first baby arrived, my wife and I walked into the social services office near the base where I was stationed in rural North Carolina. “You qualify for WIC and food stamps,” the middle-aged woman said.  I don’t know whether she disapproved of us or if all social services workers in the South oozed an understated unpleasantness.  We took the Women, Infants, Children vouchers for free peanut butter, cheese and baby formula and got into the food stamp line.

 

Looking around, I saw no other young servicemen.  Coming from the white working class, I’d always been taught that food stamps were for the “others” — failures, drug addicts or immigrants, maybe — not for real Americans like me.  I could not bear the stigma, so we walked out before our number was called.

 

Even though we didn’t take the food stamps, we lived in the warm embrace of the federal government with subsidized housing and utilities, courtesy of Uncle Sam.  Yet I blamed all of my considerable problems on the government, the only institution that was actively working to alleviate my suffering. I railed against government spending (i.e., raising my own salary).  At the same time, the earned income tax credit was the only way I could balance my budget at the end of the year.

 

I felt my own poverty was a moral failure.  To support my feelings of inadequacy, every move I made only pushed me deeper into poverty.  I bought a car and got screwed on the financing.  The credit I could get, I overused and was overpriced to start with.  My wife couldn’t get or keep a job, and we could not afford reliable day care in any case.  I was naive, broke and uneducated but still felt entitled to a middle-class existence.

 

If you had taken WIC and the EITC away from me, my son would still have eaten, but my life would have been much more miserable.  Without government help, I would have had to borrow money from my family more often.  I borrowed money from my parents less than a handful of times, but I remember every single instance with a burning shame.  To ask for money was to admit defeat, to be a de facto loser.

 

To make up for my own failures, I voted to give rich people tax cuts, because somewhere deep inside, I knew they were better than me.  They earned it.  My support for conservative politics was atonement for the original sin of being white trash.

 

In my second tour of duty, I grew in rank and my circumstances improved.  I voted for George W. Bush.  I sent his campaign money, even though I had little to spare. During the Bush v. Gore recount, I grabbed a sign and walked the streets of San Francisco to protest, carrying my toddler on my shoulders.  I got emotional, thinking of “freedom.”

 

Sometime after he took office, I watched Bush speak at an event.  He talked of tax cuts.  “It’s the people’s money,” he said.  By then I was making even better money, but I didn’t care about tax cuts for myself.  I was still paying little if any income tax, but I believed in “fairness.” The “death tax” (aka the estate tax) was unfair and rich people paid more taxes so they should get more of a tax break.  I ignored my own personal struggles when I made political decisions.

 

By the financial meltdown of 2008, I was out of the military and living in Reno, Nevada — a state hard hit by the downturn.  I voted libertarian that election year, even though the utter failure of the free market was obvious.  The financial crisis proved that rich people are no better than me, and in fact, are often inferior to average people.  They crash companies, loot pensions and destroy banks, and when they hit a snag, they scream to be rescued by government largess.  By contrast, I continued to pay my oversize mortgage for years, even as my home lost more than half its value.  I viewed my bad investment as yet another moral failure.  When it comes to voting and investing, rich people make calculated decisions, while regular people make “emotional” and “moral” ones.  Despite growing self-awareness, I pushed away reality for another election cycle.

 

In 2010, I couldn’t support my own Tea Party candidate for Senate because Sharron Angle was an obvious lunatic.  I instead sent money to the Rand Paul campaign.  Immediately the Tea Party-led Congress pushed drastic cuts in government spending that prolonged the economic pain.  The jobs crisis in my own city was exacerbated by the needless gutting of government employment.  The people who crashed the economy — bankers and business people — screamed about government spending and exploited Tea Party outrage to get their own taxes lowered.  Just months after the Tea Party victory, I realized my mistake, but I could only watch as the people I supported inflicted massive, unnecessary pain on the economy through government shutdowns, spending cuts and gleeful cruelty.

 

I finally “got it.”  In 2012, I shunned my self-destructive voting habits and supported Obama. I only wished there were a major party more liberal than the Democrats for whom I could vote.  Even as I saw the folly of my own lifelong voting record, many of my friends and family moved further into the Tea Party embrace, even as conservative policies made their lives worse.

 

I have a close friend on permanent disability.  He votes reliably for the most extreme conservative in every election.  Although he’s a Nevadan, he lives just across the border in California, because that progressive state provides better social safety nets for its disabled. He always votes for the person most likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own survival.  It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the rope-cutting razor party.

 

The people who most support the Republicans and the Tea Party carry a secret burden.  Many know that they are one medical emergency or broken down car away from ruin, and they blame the government.  They vote against their own interests, often hurting themselves in concrete ways, in a vain attempt to deal with their own, misguided shame about being poor.  They believe “freedom” is the answer, even though they live a form of wage indenture in a rigged system.

 

I didn’t become a liberal until I was nearly 40. By the time I came around, I was an educated professional, married to another professional.  We’re “making it,” whatever that means these days.  I gladly pay taxes now, but this attitude is also rooted in self-interest.  I have relatives who are poor, and without government services, I might have to support them.  We can all go back to living in clans, like cavemen, or we can build institutions and programs that help people who need it.  It seems like a great bargain to me.

 

I’m angry at my younger self, not for being poor, but for supporting politicians who would have kept me poor if they were able.  Despite my personal attempts to destroy the safety net, those benefits helped me.  I earned a bachelor’s degree for free courtesy of a federal program, and after my military service I used the GI Bill to get two graduate degrees, all while making ends meet with the earned income tax credit.  The GI Bill not only helped me, it also created much of the American middle class after World War II.  Conservatives often crow about “supporting the military,” but imagine how much better America would be if the government used just 10 percent of the military budget to pay for universal higher education, rather than saddling 20-year-olds with mortgage-like debt.

 

Government often fails because the moneyed interests don’t want it to succeed.  They hate government and most especially activist government (aka government that does something useful).  Their hatred for government is really disdain for Americans, except as consumers or underpaid labor.

 

Sadly, it took me years — decades — to see the illogic of supporting people who disdain me.  But I’m a super-slow learner.  I wish I could take the poorest, struggling conservatives and shake them.  I would scream that their circumstances or failures or joblessness are not all their fault.  They should wise up and vote themselves a break.  Rich people vote their self-interest in every single election.  Why don’t poor people? [Story by www.salon.com ]

 

 

Twitter @sheriffali

 

 

 

 

 

George W. Bush Six Vulcans [gods of fire] bears responsibility for our economic predicament and the bifurcated world, due to their visionless truncated internecine Policies!

When George W. Bush campaigned for the Presidency in 2001 he never flinched or made excuses for his lack of knowledge on International Affairs. He empathetically stated time and time again, that his lack of International knowledge wasn’t necessary, because if elected, he would appoint people that had experience and vast knowledge in determining Policies.

 

Irrespective of whether or not Bush legitimately won the 2000 election or his coronation was that of the William H. Rehnquist United States Supreme Court, Bush became President-Elect. He had already chosen Dick Cheney as his Vice President and Bush kept to his word and apart from Dick Cheney, Bush appointed five additional Vulcans. Some of the six dated back to the Richard Nixon era; Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

 

To make up for Bush’s lack of International Experience, Bush sought to bring together a team to convey intrepid; fearless, unafraid, undaunted, unflinching, unshrinking, bold, daring, gallant, heroic, indomitable and the likes, because in the past decades, Republicans were always seen by many as the Party that was better at foreign policy than Democrats. Of course such predictions turned out to be very wrong, because this group of Bush’s Policy Makers were so self-centered and conceited; they were visionless about how the world really functions.

 

Completely ignoring economics, Bush’s Vulcans set out to enact Policies solely based on America’s Military Might. Their arrogance got the better of them and they adopted a much more confrontational approach and completely ignoring our European Allies they pressed forward with missile defense that brought about uneasiness within the world community. They completely ignored international treaties and agreements that the Vulcans thought wasn’t in our country’s interest. What was most astonishing is that the Vulcans abandoned the fundamental tenets of the cold war by disavowing deterrence and containment, solely because they believed that America’s Military Power was so awesome, no one would challenge us and to make matters worse, subsequent to 9/11, the Vulcans new approach was to promote Polices of “go it alone” with preemptive strike.

 

Bush’s Vulcans totally abandoned our working relationship with the Middle East with countries such as Saudi Arabia; they openly promulgated the cause of democracy and America’s role in transforming the region by forcing democracy through the barrel of a gun. As you can see, the Invasion of Iraq was not a spontaneous one, this came about from Bush’s Vulcans and since George W. Bush had no foreign affairs experience, whatever the Vulcans handed him, he sanctioned it.

 

In hind-sight one can see how it was easy for Bush to minimize our Afghanistan’s effort that was supported by the world and invade Iraq with the Vulcans shortsightedness of really weighing what is the true meaning of “democracy.” Democracy according to Webster is’ “to respect others even when you disagree with them,” the Bush Administration totally ignored that we are a government by the people and for the people. They also forgot that despite being the most awesome military in the world, we are entwined and intertwined with the world and despite our being ahead on every front, without being engaged with the rest of the world, “alone, we would splinter and fall!” No man or woman lives or dies to themselves and neither is any Nation, whether big or small!”

 

[Not because former President George W. Bush is no longer President since January 20, 2009 can we simply ignore the damage that was done to The United States by The Bush Administration. Policies and Decisions that were made by Bush’s Vulcans that George W. Bush sanctioned, affected us economically, domestically, internationally, militarily, and within every facet of our lives. To undo the damage caused by the George W. Bush Administration, it is going to take the remainder of President Obama’s Presidency and perhaps, just perhaps, the entire first and perhaps the second term of whomever the next President is in 2017]

 

[Partisanship and Party Affiliation, Republicans or Democrats,  Liberals and Conservatives and our lack of “real facts” has left most of the American people uninformed, ignorant, brainwashed or otherwise,  and it is going to cause us to self-destruct, unless or until, we stop trying to rip each other throats out, not because of hate, but surely, because of ignorance.]

 

Twitter @sheriffali