I’m taking a week off here at RJsCorner. See you again on March 4
I need to get a few rants out of my system before I explode. 😳 That is what this Sunday post is about.
Morally Incompatible
John Pavlovitz is becoming one of my primary “Go-To” guys on the Internet. He is a very popular minister and public speaker who does not parse words on things he is passionate about. His Twitter message above is a line in the sand for him, and it is becoming my line too.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that all of you who voted for the current incompetent are automatically in the MAGA fold. But if you still support him after all the disgrace he has spewed out then maybe we are simply morally incompatible.
About Income Taxes
America invented progressive taxation. And there was a time when leading American politicians were proud to proclaim their willingness to tax the wealthy, not just to raise revenue, but to limit excessive concentration of economic power.
Source: New York Times
“It is important,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, “to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes” — some of them, he declared, “swollen beyond all healthy limits.”
The quote above by Paul Krugman reminds those who study our nation’s history, that this is not the first time America’s wealth has been concentrated in the hands of so few. It has now come to the point that the top 0.1 percent have as much as the bottom 90 percent. It has never been that skewed even during the “Robber Baron” years.
Maybe I am wrong, but I think the time is FINALLY ripe to rebalance things. After all, how much discretionary income does one person really need?
There Is Reason For Hope
Mr. Trump’s hard-core base is large enough to dominate the Republican Party, at least for now, but it is not large enough to dominate the country. In the long run, a third or so of the country cannot effectively govern the other two-thirds with an unpopular agenda and a Twitter account.
Mr. Trump will almost surely achieve less legislatively in the second half of his term than he did in the first, when Republicans controlled both branches of Congress — and even then their record was not impressive.
Source:New York Times
The Republican party was shrinking before Trump took office and as a result of him, it will likely shrink significantly more in the next few years. Yes, maybe two-thirds of the of a shrinking GOP base still consider him their savior but even that almost certainly guarantees he will be a one-term president. That is if the other two-thirds of the electorate turn on election day.
In fact, we may just come to thank the MAGA folks for showing us just how unbalanced our branches of government have become. I have hope that things will change pretty dramatically come 2021 and beyond and we will get back to a nation of all the people, instead of a greedy ruling elite.
But Let’s Be Realistic
It is rumored that the Mueller Investigation will finally release its report to the Attorney General this coming week. I hope that he has found so many smoking guns that it is impossible for Congress to ignore them. But, in reality, since the report is presented only to the Attorney General, who has sworn his loyalty to Trump, it’s not hard to imagine that he will do everything he can to squash any damaging information and not release much of anything to Congress. Let’s not get our hopes up in that regard. We may have to live with this poor excuse for a President 23 more months.
There just seems to be one bad thing after another happening in America today. It is hard to stay optimistic about our future. Our current Oval Office occupant is inciting hatred and ignorance among his “followers” so now they are trying to kill the people he does not like. Some seem to have gulped down the cool-aid he is serving by the gallon! It just seems to get worse and worse as each day passes. I am a very strong advocate of Thomas Jefferson’s quote “Hope is sweeter than despair” so I look for hope especially during these trying times. I know basic change, even when it appears rather suddenly, will take time to overcome especially when the wackos seem to control everything. But I have latched onto a reason for hope. To understand that read the excerpts below, and I would encourage you to read the whole source if you have the time:
Fear of this or that is so prominent in our American society right now. A substantial minority on the right fringe of our political system has made fear a foundation of their lives. But the most tragic thing is that those on the rest of the political spectrum have allowed the rather thin minority’s fear to convince us that all hope is lost!
So, I celebrate Mr. Trump’s success in making a deal with the Democrats even to the total dismay of the GOP. Maybe this is the beginning of a successful Trump strategy. I am certainly a dreamer aren’t I? 🙂
I don’t necessarily call, at least yet, our current times evil but none the less the Edmund Burke quote above applies to where we are as a country. Too many of us decided to sit out the last election cycle and what we got is the result. I certainly hope that this is a lesson learned and election participation increases dramatically in the coming years. We can no longer allow a radical fringe minority to choose our country’s leadership.
But to me “Hope is sweeter than despair”. I simply can’t live with the possibility of today becoming the new norm for our country. When one of my fellow bloggers who I probably admire the most proclaims that “Empathy is dead in our government” it shocked me to no end. This person is usually a very upbeat soul who blogs that anyone can have a happy and satisfying retirement and then helps us to understand how to make that happen. He is now basically saying that we are all on our own as the future will be “survival of the fittest” so you have to take care of yourself.
I have to admit up front that for much of my life I just didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I “grew up”. Strangely, it wasn’t until several years into my retirement that I finally put that question to rest. So, I am NOT the poster child for gaining purpose in life, but maybe my shortcomings in this area might be a lesson for others.
A fundamental problem with this country and many others around the world is that too many just don’t have any idea what the meaning of our country is supposed to be about? Without this foundation, every bad thing that happens causes ever-increasing cynicism and selfishness. There is no hope because there is no overall vision for what we want our country to be. Positive thinking seems to have almost vanished in the world today. Maybe even more tragically, there are those who have come to a conclusion about purpose and their answer is simply too self-centered to be of value.
recognize that a person does not need to put in a 40 hour week to be determined valuable we can move beyond that 100-year-old paradigm. Voice recognition has made major improvements in the last year or so. For me, that means closed captioning is almost real-time and more accurate than it ever has been. Anyone that uses a smartphone knows that voice-to-text is also getting much more accurate. I suspect that in the near future a universal translator will be on the scene. That will mean that we can go anywhere in the world and fully communicate despite language barriers. Our future is bright indeed.
But for far too many of us our world is a world of fear. We fear others that are different from us. We think their overlying purpose is to do us harm. Republicans hate Democrats, progressives have conservatives. Our fear list is almost unlimited. The current U.S. Federal administration is all about fear. They are seriously considering drastically increasing an already absurd military budget while making some draconian cuts to brother’s keeper issues. Everything seems to be about fear now. Hope has moved to a back burner when it should be on the forefront.