I
was worried about this one. Really
worried. In my life time I’ve noticed a
surge of megalomaniacal selfishness in this country. The gap between the wealthy and the poor
widens more and more, and for some reason, the poor in this country are all for
it. It seems that the people of the
United States are holing up in their bunkers and telling their neighbors to go
fuck themselves. It’s all about Me, Me,
Me. If You, You, You are having trouble,
it’s all your fault. You didn’t educate
yourself enough; You didn’t make the right choices; You should have known
better.
It’s
hard to believe there have been people arguing seriously that the USPS should
be shut down, that FedEx and UPS are good enough, better even. Why subsidize the USPS when FedEx can get the
same letter to the same place for $12.00?
People are actually arguing that even roads should be privately funded;
the government has no place in anything.
It’s
easy to believe that most people think this way too, since those proponing
these arguments talk so loud. It doesn’t
matter if you’re right, just say it loud and say it over and over and over
again. If you say it loud enough and
enough times, it has to be true.
However,
today the majority of Americans went to the polls and let everyone know, that’s
just not how things are. Our neighbors
are important, even if they have had a hard time of it lately; government still
serves a great and higher purpose, even if it could use some cleaning up; there
are some things more important than individual gain, especially when so many of
us are hurting so bad.
It
could have easily gone the other way.
We’re hurting, and have been for a long time now. It’s easy to point a finger at a scape goat
and forget that, sometimes, it’s simply not any one person’s fault, sometimes
things are bad. We have a tendency in
this country to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; if it is
broke, throw the whole damn thing out and go buy something completely
different. When I voted for Obama earlier
today, I wasn’t voting for his economic plan, his jobs plan, his race, or any
other particular policy. Why? Because, quite simple, the President doesn’t
control those things. The President is
an enforcer of laws, not a creator of laws.
When it comes down to it, I was voting for a very simple principle:
there are some things more important than me.
As
an attorney with my own firm, I have a pretty good earning potential. If I thought it was all about me, a
Republican vote would have been the logical choice. Their party line, for as long as I can
remember now, has been all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, making
your way on your own, and keeping everything you get along the way. With my profession, and my fiancée’s
profession, our kids will never want for anything. They’ll have the best education, the best
health care, the best food, etc. That’s
just not good enough for me. Every kid
should have that. No family should have
to worry about affording a hospital trip, or housing, or food, just because
Daddy’s worked construction all his life, some bankers somewhere destroyed the
housing industry, and he can’t find a job now.
As
a bankruptcy attorney, I see stuff like this every single day. Conservative pundits like to blame it on any
of a number of things: they didn’t work hard enough, they weren’t smart enough,
they made bad decisions. That simply is
not true. It’s a fallacy they propone,
because they profit from the policies that fallacy leads to. As someone who is involved in the last resort
of some of those that are struggling, I can attest to the fact that, in the
vast majority of those cases, that idea, that myth, is complete horseshit.
I
am extremely happy tonight that the majority of Americans seem to feel the same
way, at least a little bit. Their
reasoning might be different, but I feel that, down at some fundamental level,
we all stood up today and said: There are some things that are more important
than Me.
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