What's Been and What's Ben

Well played Democrats. The last election showed that the Democratic base stayed home. Obama was elected already. Hope is busy walking his dog and saving the free world. So they decided to stir the pot of crazy and put abortion on the table. Several decades ago a supreme court decision decided that we (women) have the right to an abortion because of privacy. It became the status quo. The majority of Americans are in favor of this. Republicans use it as a perpetual issue. They will not challenge it because it provides a war they can always rally against. If overturned, it would rally the Democratic base to the point where Democrats would have overwhelming majorities in house, senate, and oval office after the next elections. I could see it as something that could be traded away for the public option. Republicans really want to derail it.

The I thought of another paranoid delusion. What is the US economy was intentionally crashed by US. It would make us look less domineering to the rest of the world. I image a group of secret trillionaires – the ones that own Bill Gates – could see an interest in doing so. I like to link everything back to disaster capitalism. It is fro the book (the Shock Doctrine) which has the idea that only in crisis can things be changed. To an extreme view, the FEMA response to Katrina could be a way of proving that the government is incompetent. I sometimes jokingly think that Republicans are intentionally incompetent at government so that it does fail and get smaller. It benefits the wealthy. A drive for a bigger government is the idea that larger governments (tax burdens) creates a more equal distribution of wealth – like in Scandinavia. Enough crazy conspiracy theories. I personally view large conspiracies as unlikely due to the tandem parts of human nature: incompetence and the inability to keep a secret. At the end of the day it would be almost comforting to have a global conspiracy. They would have a large interest in long term stability. They could only accumulate so much wealth. Although it might just become a game to them. Healthcare will be a struggle.

I hope in a decade we have universal healthcare in the United States. Everything important America has done has been difficult. Washington didn’t know he would win the Revolution, Lincoln didn’t know the country could reunify, FDR didn’t know he would beat Nazi Germany, Regan didn’t know he would overcome Communist Russia, and Obama doesn’t know that he will be able to bring America prosperously into the new millennia we largely helped to build. I disagree with those that cite the idea that the next generation (my generation) will be the first generation in American history to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Threats to our existence have only made us stronger and defined us as a nation. If anything, our spirit encounters malaise due to the bounty brought to us during periods of good harvests. We change with our environment, adapting as biological systems do. Democracy is naturally frustrating and a constant (metaphorical) fight.