One of my favorite heroes has always been Robin Hood. I imagine that has something to do with the fact I have always struggled financially. To put it politically incorrect, I’m poor.
Poor in the sense that if I stopped working just for a couple of weeks, many things in my life would come to an end ( food, shelter, etc.). Life is bounced paycheck to paycheck. I can’t imagine how those at or below the poverty line make a living. Making minimum wage and working 40 hours a week one makes $14,872 a year. Working full time rarely happens however because many employers would be forced to pay benefits.
In “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells wrote, “Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
This would be an accurate description of how the rich cast their intentions towards the poor. More now than ever, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Everything ever designed in the spirit of equality and fairness has been slowly degraded in this country by greed. These days I can’t even look America in the face and say “democracy” without laughing.
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” Thomas Jefferson said over 200 years ago and prior to the industrial revolution. We are failing.
Economic slavery propelled through rampant debt, low pay and rising costs is the best way to ensure a “freeman” remains a hard working man. It is the delicate act of keeping a person just desperate enough to trudge on demoralized and dependent without pressing their economic shackles to the breaking point. Someone with nothing to lose has little to fear. Death at times can be quite a comfortable solution when faced with an utter lack of control. What they fear is change. I find this idea of being trapped a prelude to an inevitable end – a fate predetermined by man and machine counting finely type numbers on a quarterly report.
I hear of laws in America regulating the right to protest and other things. As if protesting ever needs the government’s consent in the first place. A government that would strike out against such freedoms of expressions should in fact be rigorously protested against. Nothing can stop the people, no government on earth or law ever written can be undone.
A republic steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Do you believe they would surrender their money if was made voluntary? The ones with more need to pay for the ones with less. Because of these democratic social beliefs, we have public schools, police and libraries. Americans should also be awarded a national health care plan and college education. They would be free in a sense but they’d be paid for in all our taxes. Truly though think of how much that would save most of us and who it would cost the most.
The cries of how business is more efficient than government do not deter because they are supposed to have two different objectives. One does all it can for financial profit and the other aids in helping the people it represents. A corporation could not survive as a democracy any more than a democracy could survive as a corporation.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that, “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization ... The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”
It is our choice.
It is your voice.