How selfish we’ve become. This is like junior high/high school “elections”.
There’s no such thing as sportsmanship. How often have you seen a successful, respected sportsperson throw down his ball or racket and say, “I’m not
playing. I’m going home. If I can’t have it my way, I’m not going to
play! So there. I’m telling my daddy on you!” The average poor to middle class American people are like the pawns in a chess game. Well, this is not a
game.
I don’t know how long I can hold onto my house, and I’m pretty sure this Christmas won’t happen; that’s true for lots of people, millions in fact. There won’t be any turkey roast for far too many. Elders will live in unheated homes this winter. The congress and Wall Street, both, are acting like toddlers who haven’t learned any basic rules of fair play, sharing, and caring. They want all or nothing. Somewhere along the line, the majority of these animals lost the quality of sympathy (if they ever had it).
This isn’t a game, because people are literally dying from starvation,
exposure to the elements and lack of health care; patients are dying needlessly for lack of simple, preventive health care: this is your death panel. People are living in pain, because they can’t afford to go to the doctor, nor pay for a prescription, even if they could see a doctor.
What is the matter with these people? It’s my opinion that the majority of our congressional “leaders” have anti-social disorder, or what used to be called, sociopaths. The personality characteristics match to a tee. Is this our country? I guess it is. What a shame. And it started out with such great ideals.
The idea of the rugged individualist is a myth, at worst, a fabricated, self-serving lie; in the early years of settling this country, pitching in and sharing the load was a given, survival depended on it. We helped our neighbors with barn-raisings, helped the neighbor bring in their crops when someone was too ill to help, helped put out the fire when a house or barn was burning down, we shared our food if our neighbor was hungry.
One thing we’ve retained is the abhorrant idea that, if we can take it, it’s ours; we did it to the Native American, to the African-American. We shun immigrants. Let me remind us all that, unless we’re of Native American descent, we’re all immigrants. What, indeed, was the Statue of Liberty representative of?
He who has the most money should not have the power to make all the decisions that affect the entire country. One vote per person is wiped out with Citizen’s United. I can’t write an anonymous check for $1,000,000 in order to get my way. What happened to working hard to build a life, to work together to figure out what’s best for everyone? What happened to community pride? What happened to being proud of running or working for a company that could honestly stamp “Made in the USA” on its product, whose productivity benefited the entire country, through taxes and employment and people in the USA who could buy their stuff?
Shame, shame, shame, shame. Of course, sociopaths don’t have the ability to feel shame, they have no conscience. Sociopaths are 100% self-absorbed, narcissistic, of the mind that “I got mine, you get yours.” So appealing to shame and conscience falls on deaf ears. I once heard a very wealthy man say, “At some point it stops being about the amount of money you’ve got, because you could never in a million years spend the money you’ve already accumulated; it becomes the game of “who’s got the most stuff”?
There is not one single person out there who is a “self-made-man”. That is a myth, or worse, a self-aggrandizing delusion. Get real. Every time someone reached out their hand, introduced you to a person responsible for hiring, gave you a chance, even when they had some doubts about you, gave you a second chance, when they knew you’d made some mistakes in the past, gave you a loan, stopped on the freeway when they saw you had a flat tire, went to war in your place because they felt patriotic, and they fought and gave their life in place of yours, so you could have a chance at freedom and the fast-fading American Dream, you’ve been helped along the way. Every time you drive down a public road, drink clean water, enter a building knowing the roof won’t fall on top of your head because there are building codes, every time you use a public utility, you are being helped by the community. That means you’re not a “self-made anything”; that means a lot of people have gotten together and decided to behave like a community.
Can we pause just for a moment and rethink this thing? Can we take a few minutes to recall the basic social skills we learned when we were in our primary grades at school? Can we give one more try at being a “we” society? Can we give a shot at being a community, again? I know my children and grandchildren would like that.
©Janet Mitchell, October, 2011
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