Over the past couple months I've been writing blog posts with the aim of showing the facts about each of the two main candidates. And every time I dig into theses men: who they are, what they've done, and what they'll do, I find it increasingly difficult to be "fair and balanced". I mean, c'mon, how can people not realize that Romney is a liar, that his agenda is simply to award the upper class while using social issues to bamboozle the heartland folks into ceding power to him and his cronies? How could they not see that he's a member of the wealth-creation and corporate vulture culture that brought about this current mess we're in?
I know a lot of Republicans - actually, I'm probably friends with more Republicans than Democrats, if not at least about the same number. And most of them are extremely intelligent, are not liars, are not scumbags; most of them are genuinely good human beings. And yet how can we be at such loggerheads - how is it that we have such different ideas as to what is the correct direction of our nation when we have such similar ideas as to what is the correct direction and purpose of our individual lives? That is, we all have such similar grasps of logic, of right and wrong, of good and evil - so why do we disagree on something so important as how our nation should exist and function as to its citizenry and the world at large; i.e. politics?
This more than anything else about the 2012 election has disturbed me, frustrated me, infuriated me, and depressed me. One of us has to be right and the other wrong but why and, even more, how did we end up like this? And am I just as biased, blind, and self-serving as I accuse the hardcore rightwingers of being?
So I decided to trace why I believe the way I believe with the hope that maybe somebody else will explain to me why he believes the way he does.
I mean maybe if I'd grown up differently I'd be sitting here talking about the whining, cliched liberals. And surely a great portion of our beliefs stem from self-interest. Here are mine:
I can't afford good health care, it's just not in the cards to spend 20% of my weekly take-home on insurance. I had to get my shoulder worked on and it took my HMO months of running around and unnecessary bills before they could finally do the basic AC scope. And don't even get me started on my wife's experience with Kaiser. So I want a president who'll move us towards universal health care like practically every other civilized nation in the world. Especially since our health care-as-business hasn't necessarily yielded the best health for the patients in our nation (we're number 37 in the world for healthcare, in spite of being #1 for spending). Talk all you want on the trail but we've had competing insurance agents and hospitals and all that for decades, Mitt, and it hasn't proven as efficient as you claim it to be.
I love hiking mountains and swimming in the ocean. I wouldn't mind it if we tore down 90% of the skyscrapers in America, cut down the amount of kids running around, and started living in treehouses and such. And we can't pretend any more that global warming isn't real but certainly a man mocking environmentalism, like Mitt, shouldn't be president for that.
I think everybody should pay more taxes, but especially the people who have more play around cash. America increasingly has two economies - the one that operates in a global marketplace and the one that operates domestically. Thanks to outsourcing, accounting mastery, and just the nature of foreign trade the global economy is booming but the national one is not. We used to be the nation that asked not what our country could do for us, who were so proud of being Americans that we wanted to spread our big financial gains out to the others who weren't so lucky or skilled (isn't being born with more skills just another form of luck?) or who just decide to take care of the homefront - teachers, local bankers, social workers, factory men and women, the ones that improve life for the most amount of people, and in that way make our nation as a whole better. I want to return to that.
The list could go on but let's check it out from a different perspective:
Many Republicans have never known how it is to feel hungry because you just spent your last cent on rent and utilities and gas for the drive to work. But I can't imagine how it must feel to write a 6 figure check to the IRS.
Many Republicans don't know how it feels to see your father, who's extremely intelligent and well-respected, still working his ass off in his 7th decade because he spent his younger years trying to save the world instead of whoring for the almighty buck. I can't imagine how it feels to pay an estate tax on the property my father or grandfather or perhaps great-great grandfather, somebody before me, worked hard for.
I don't know how it must feel to know your father missed your sports games and such growing up because he was working 90 hours a week on Wall Street so you could be comfortable. My parents always put family and friends first and business second. When I told this to a staunch right wing boss of mine, he told me that I was wrong, that business must always come first so I walked out.
I'm closer to the have nots than the haves, even though I grew up with the haves, and so maybe that's why I side with the have nots. Maybe I would be a Republican if I had millions of dollars because at that point, really, all Government's good for is making sure nobody attacks who might take your money. If you have millions of dollars you have enough to eat, to relax, to go on vacation, to send your children to school and so why should you pay for something you're not using like universal health care or welfare? Bukowski said that only rich people care about war because for poor people it doesn't matter who's in charge, they'll still be working their fingers to the bone until they die. So of course you'd only want your money going there.
I don't have millions. I don't even have tens of thousands. So I'm aligning myself with the people who work their asses off but due to a confluence of misfortune and/or different value systems and/or weakness have just enough to get to work and home, get their family fed, and continue on with life. Just like it looks like socialism from a certain angle if these people receive help they didn't pay for, from another angle it looks like slavery when people are born with little or no opportunities to do anything but work 40 to 80 hours a week at a minimum wage job because you can't go to school when you've been working full-time since you were a kid and you can't quit or move up when you have to sprint as hard as you can just to meet your monthly expenses.
If you believe in God then you can claim its God's edict that you're born to a rich family and those other suckers are born to a poor family. And surely that dictates, to a large extent, how we view the world. Though I always find it interesting how the right uses religion to explain why abortion and fags are evil but you never see placards about how Jesus said it was easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven or Jesus' attitude on taxes, that is "give to Caesar that which is Caesar's", AKA, "stop bitching about taxes and pay them." And then there's the whole religious right supporting a Mormon - how can they use the bible to justify prejudices and socially conservative laws while supporting a man who believes the Garden of Eden's in Missouri and that drinking alcohol's a sin? People howled when JFK, a Catholic, became president but not a peep from these people about the Mormon? Ehh...
But in general we learn about and understand religion in great part from our parents. Just like politics, whatever religion your parents are, usually so are you.
It all starts with the parents.
I wonder what a nation of orphans would believe should we not have had our parents' prejudices and beliefs to guide us, to build a foundation towards a certain side from our childhood which, by the time we've reached adulthood, grows into a concrete bunker. But since it starts with the parents, here's my own self-analysis.
My parents met at a youth group my dad ran with the intent of taking troubled kids from the streets of Baltimore on camping trips. Get them out of the filth and the drugs and teach 'em to appreciate the silence of nature, the simplicity of waking and sleeping away from crackheads and streetlamps, get 'em setting up tents and building fires and cooking food in the middle of nowhere.
It was the early 70's. People were still brimming with hope from the 60's, hope that would fade by the 80's but still. My parents were fierce believers that the world could be a better place and, even more, that it would start by helping out all the disenfranchised who were born with two strikes against them. If you wish to see injustice just look at a crack baby born in the ghettoes of Baltimore. Seriously, what chance do they have? My parents' idea was that they both came from loving, supportive and strong working to middle class and would be hypocrites should they take that for granted.
As such my parents from back then became fervent supporters of the Democratic party which had begun its journey towards being the party of the poor, the middle class, and of artists while the Republican party was shoring up its identity as the party of the wealthy, of corporations and of social conservatives.
I have early memories riding around with my parents to campaign events yelling "Vote for Barbara Mikulski" out the window; pretending to be a grown-up at a fundraiser for Joe Curran. My parents believed that the key was strengthening the bottom and voting for people who also believed in strengthening from the bottom, building a foundation, instead of strengthening the top and hoping it would trickle down as if the men at the top were sieves.
But no, that's not the whole story. My Grandfather was up to the point when he died a staunch supporter of the Republican party, even though he was fucked over by the very oil company where he raised through the ranks to become a higher-up before they fired him on a technicality just before he could retire with full benefits. And my uncles are Republicans to this day. So my father couldn't be the reason, the sole reason, I'm such a liberal. And even more, were Goldwater or George Romney to look at today's Republican party they would probably be disgusted - that is, your parents' party cannot be your own because the parties have (d)evolved so much since their generation it's amazing that one can still claim the same party affiliation as the Republicans or Democrats of generations prior.
So maybe it was my upbringing.
I've gone to private schools basically my whole life.
I went to a Catholic school for 1-8. I never realized that most of the others had more money than me and didn't know until afterwards that the main reason my parents could afford to send me there was only that my dad did the books for the church for free. I never realized that most families didn't go on camping trips in Virginia or drive to Florida from Baltimore in a beat-up Chevrolet station wagon. Even more, I didn't realize that we did this because my parents, still committed to saving the world, eschewed much higher-paying jobs for non-profit work. I never realized that the reason we lived in Fells Points while all my classmates lived in the suburbs was because of money.
Then I went to high school. Family moved to a place in the suburbs, a little bit of a fixer-upper but it wasn't weird that my dad and an old friend, one of those kids he helped through his camping 501C3 back in the day, did all the work on it instead of hiring contractors. Even in high school I was still somewhat class blind. 4-story Victorian family beach home in Bay Head? Compound in Ruxton with a tennis court? That's nice. Sure, I always wondered why I had to work all summer and sometimes during the school year and on weekends while the others didn't seem to but whatever. Never much of a social kid anyway. And yeah, it was annoying that instead of study hall I had to work in the school library to augment the scholarship I got but hey, for a writer working in a library isn't really working, even if it is mostly just shelving and finding books. I didn't see brands of ski jackets or whether the polo was Polo or K-Mart and didn't get why sometimes I got queer looks at the clothes I was wearing.
It wasn't until college that I first became aware of money, class, all that. I went to a super-high-end Catholic Private college in San Diego. On scholarship. And I even had a car, a used Ford Probe Dad bought from my uncle. But I was surrounded by college kids driving brand new SUV's and coupes; one girl had an SLK with a license plate frame that said "Daddy Bought It, I Got It." Another kid drove a Ferrari. Kids with AmEx's and 30-50k a year allowances. I couldn't handle the excess and the pressure, couldn't handle having to work at Campus catering and study for a biology major and playing lacrosse while everybody else seemed to have more time to relax. I re-appraised my future - I couldn't be a marine biologist, spend the rest of my life taking water samples for Sea World for 30 grand a year and maybe occasionally whoring myself out for a research grant. The message was loud and clear - business is where it's at. So I stepped back for a year, went to a school in Steamboat Springs CO where I felt the equalizer that is the ski town - that is, wealth equals what you want/what you have and so if you just learn to be happy with the simple things in life, nature, hikes, camaraderie you'll be a millionaire - and took business classes for much cheaper.
Then it was back to San Diego. This time around money was a little tighter. I found myself constantly hungry while my friends had allowances and credit cards which allowed them to eat a casual lunch at Cheesecake Factory (Jesus, to dream...) or even simply able to get a Chipotle burrito whenever they wanted. I got a job working fulltime but since I had to pay rent and bills and gas and all I was always broker than the others, most of whom didn't work at all. And yes, I'll admit I probably spent more than I needed to on beer but it was always the cheapest and it was a necessity to allow me to try and function as a social member of society, like we're always told to be, goddammit. And I'll also admit, those same friends who were comfortable did help me - they have leftovers, I got 'em. They wanted to eat and I couldn't afford it, they'd cover me with their credit card. Homeboy asks me to pick him up a ball and he's got the dough, he'd usually split it with me.
And yet I was never envious. Not sure why, it's a strange thing but I've never envied other people's wealth and ease. I feel like I'd like to attain that someday, I'd like everybody to attain it to some level. How can you begrudge somebody else something you'd like to attain yourself without setting yourself up to become the thing you then despise (as jealousy and envy are certainly hand in hand with hatred)? You can't.
So I graduated, just barely. And at that milestone I stopped, looked around and realized I was fucking done. Exhausted. Working fulltime year round while carrying a full course load and playing lacrosse and jr. networking - Jesus it was draining. I had help from people. Like my parents, when I was in real dire straits. And my lacrosse coach, who gave me a little financial help from time to time and constantly told me he didn't know how I did it. This was a man who at his death was one of the top counter-terrorism experts in the CIA.
That's when my politics really began to take shape. I'm from a strong middle-class family. I'm well-educated and most people who know me will tell you I'm "smart" (though I still don't know what that means). I work my ass off. But I realized then that I was no better off than people who worked half as hard, who never had to have a job but could just go to class (during the one semester I just went to class I got straight A's; afterwards B's started creeping in).
This isn't to get people to sympathize with me. I know that's always the first Republican argument, that we just want them to feel sorry for people who have it tough, to feel guilty and that's not my purpose. My only point here is if a smart, hard-working, middle class white male from a loving family and a solid background has to struggle to the point of exhaustion to attain an education, how can you expect the average lower-class kid who's working fulltime from the time he's 13 and has nobody at home motivating him to study and do well in school, how can you expect that kid to have a chance? And if he does, his chance is certainly not equal to that of the kids who just happened to come out of the crotch of a wealthy woman. And that's why I believe in social programs, because there is very real inequality in this world and in this nation. You can preach pulling yourself up by your bootstraps all you want but what if you can't afford boots?
Which brings me to hypocrisy.
I know a kid from high school who's extremely vocal in his bashing of democrats and his touting of the divinity of the right. Like, Glenn Beck style touting. He constantly talks about how lazy the average welfare recipient is, how all these people need to do is go to work and stop trying to take his money so they can just sit around. He believes that the government exists only to protect us from enemies and that's it.
I find his comments ironic because he preaches self-sufficiency yet he currently works in the comfortable front office of a company his grandfather and father built into a juggernaut. A manufacturing company born in WWII which, no doubt, benefited from the increased government expenditures during and after the war effort bankrolled by American taxes that topped out at 85% and helped along by the strongest middle class in the history of our nation, made up in Baltimore, for example, of hardworking blue collar earners in neighborhoods that now stand blighted (David Simon calls it a "cyst") by that city's painful post-industrial decline. That is, this kid preaches self-sufficiency when he's never had to interview for a real job, never had to go out and get said job and, while he's certainly smart and probably worked hard in school, the simple fact is he's never had the slightest bit of uncertainty about where his next meal was coming from. He's never had to be self-sufficient.
And then there was the time he blew up a teacher's mailbox in college. That would have gotten most other students expelled and possibly in federal prison. But somehow he got a slap on the wrist suspension and was allowed to finish his degree.
How such a person can preach self-reliance and independence when, for all intents and purposes, he owes most of his "accomplishments" to the men who came before him I don't know. If somebody is always borrowing money from his parents or living at home, he's considered a loser. But if he inherits money from his family or lives in a family estate it's considered noble? Does this sound to anybody else like the old system of royalty and aristocracy American Democracy was founded to combat?
If he didn't have his family money but instead had to rise from the ghetto would he have ended up at an ivy league? If he hadn't had his family influence but instead had to explain his "prank" of blowing up the mailbox of a teacher who he disliked without outside intervention, would he have been allowed to graduate from said ivy? If he hadn't had his family company but had to interview for an entry-level job and work his way up, would he be preaching the right-wing gospel that money comes from the top down? I don't know. And if he says he does he's possibly a prophet in the biblical sense, or maybe the greatest mind in the history of physics and thus capable of exploring alternate realities. Or he's just full of shit.
And maybe if I had a yacht I could take on global travels at the drop of a hat because I never had to ask for vacation time and had millions of dollars at my disposal, perhaps I too would be irritated at folks telling me I had to give them money to support programs for the black-faced thugs I only see on street corners or only hear about murdering and doing heron and passing syphilis. I'd like to think I'd still be a Democrat but, honestly, I just don't know. As I get older I find a lot of my viewpoints swaying more right every year. For example, I'm for the death penalty.
I'm not saying this to pass judgment on the kid and certainly I don't fault him his good fortune. But I feel he's a bit too comfortable faulting others for their misfortune.
So our biggest disagreements, then, come down to cause and effect.
Us liberals believe that poverty is an effect of the lower-class unemployment caused by the increased outsourcing of blue collar American jobs and the weakness of public programs for the indigent due to underfunding which in turn causes crime as that disenfranchised class turns to the only "equalizer" at its disposal; the conservatives believe that poverty and violent crime is an effect of laziness and weakness and that laziness and weakness is also why we don't have industry, because they don't work hard enough to buy things which will spur a need for increased production of consumables. Why would you, who either worked hard (or are descended from somebody who worked hard) support somebody who's lazy (or is descended from somebody who's lazy)?
Though let me be frank for a second, I know a helluva lot more lazy rich people than lazy poor people. Though perhaps the lesson is they can afford to be lazy while the others can't...
But what if it's not their fault? I guess that's where I disagree with the right - because yes, some people are lazy and, shit, you can't save everybody. And we'll never make the system fair. But seriously, it's not someone's fault if he grew up with crackhead parents who started smoking crack after years of unemployment because their jobs were outsourced to China because that meant higher profits for the folks at the top and the Americans had no other skills and, even more, couldn't afford advanced training because technical schools cost money they had to spend on keeping food in their children's mouths. Just like I'm not resentful of people who grew up wealthy because, again, they didn't choose that, so too can one not be resentful of the poor who need a hand, right?
Whether you believe it's God or Jesus or just bad luck, there are a lot of people who can't afford health care, who can't even afford food or sneakers or a fucking ID (I remember times in college when 20 bucks for a ID might as well have been a hundred - hell, 20 bucks was all I had to live on for a week of food) in America. I have a degree from one of the best colleges in the country, 10 years of marketing and sales experience, all with positive reviews and in such high-end and diverse companies as a national retailer headquarters, a Hollywood Agency, and a boutique ad agency run by a former Mad Man - as well as I've been part of or founded 4 start-ups - and I have several years of freelance copywriting experience - and yet I regularly send out resumes to no avail (though, in full disclosure, they are to very sought after positions). I can just imagine the opportunities available for the kids who had to drop out of high school to support their little brother or their parents or simply dropped out because nobody at home cared and, shit, what kid wants to go to school if their parents aren't pushing them?
So that's a big reason why I'm another cliched Liberal.
Like my parents I refuse to look at human life and our society in general as a series of financial reports, as if the true measure and health of a nation can be summed up in the binary codes of dollars on a computer screen.
Like my parents I believe that a government and society in general is responsible for even its lowest members. And that you can't rely on the private sector to take care of the indigent.
And admittedly I'm biased because hell, an increase in taxes for people making over 250 grand a year won't affect me in the slightest (and if the day comes that I'm writing the IRS a million dollar check, I feel like I'd skip my way to the bank because that would mean I'm going home with $800k at least, more than has ever passed through my bank account in my whole 31 years - but then again, that's speculation). But if you make $300 grand and pay 50% in taxes, you're still pulling in more than double the American average.
I believe there's too much chance involved in financial success, beginning from whether you're born into a loving comfortable family or in a flophouse in downtown hell, and as such the ones who have been lucky owe it to God, to Buddha, to the universe, or simply to the fact that the unlucky are supposedly their countrymen and women, they owe it to the great magnet, for fuck's sake, to share that fortune with those less fortunate. And yes, that will probably benefit assholes who manipulate the system. But can you say with a straight face that no rich folks have ever manipulated the system (Goldman Sachs / JP Morgan / AIG / everybody involved in the mortgage crisis, I'm looking at you)?
I believe that a lot of people preaching self-sufficiency have never had to be self-sufficient; a lot of them have had a parental safety net and, even more, haven't ever really had on boots, much less have they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
I believe that a lot of the problems facing the urban poor have been caused by policies put into place by Republican presidents to allow corporations to chase after their own fiscal success which, while surely augmenting the bottom line for a few, ruins the lives for many. And that these blue collar workers, railroaded for buying into an American dream that they hadn't had the prescience to see crumbling, should've been helped and re-trained then, when it all fell apart; that now things are much worse and the longer we take to address the rampant poverty ruining all of our great post-industrial cities the worse it'll get until we finally pass a point of no return and Indianapolis, Detroit, Baltimore, so on become American versions of Tijuana.
I just don't believe somebody should be able to buy new things that will only slightly improve their lives (a 6th car, for example, or a second vacation home) in exchange for destroying another person's livelihood; that is, one man's opulent excess is not a fair trade for another man's starvation. That's just a simple law of human decency and, for those of you religious folks, that's also a law of God and Jesus.
I believe to build something great, to allow it to weather the future hardships of this world, you need to start at the bottom, at the foundation. Not at the top. The middle class will not reappear if we increase benefits for the upper class. It will reappear if we strengthen the lower class via education benefits, via increased social funding and so forth. In fact, should taxes stay where they are, should corporate regulations be erased and should our nation turn towards the same financial principles which have led to Mitt's successes at Bain, we will end up with a greater divide between top and bottom and be even closer to accepting our official role as onetime-superpower-in-decline. Look at history. We look like England, the Netherlands, Spain, all the greats that came before us, then got fat and happy and let the middle class disappear.
I believe our military is the strongest in the world by far. And I believe that wars will not be fought the way they used to be and as such we need to spend smarter, not more. On top of that, we should stop trying to police the world and start trying to heal our homefront.
And that's why I'm a liberal. I don't begrudge anybody success. I don't hate white people, don't envy those who have money. To be honest, I'm happy with my life. I have my writing, I have my surfing and snowboarding and mountain climbing; a loving wife, loving parents and the best brother a guy could have. And I've got a wolf dog. And most likely neither president will affect me that much personally. But for all the above reasons, I think the future of our nation lies in the masses of lower class Americans, not the powerful few upper class Americans.
Though that's probably my own middle class bias. If anybody wants to give me 10 million dollars to become a Republican, shit, then maybe we'll see how strong my convictions are.
But seriously, I'd be interested to hear from Republicans about why they believe the way they do. If nothing else it's a good exercise.
And also know that once these big elections are over, I won't write another political post.
For a while at least.
Happy elections.
- Ryan
Excellent article. Perfectly articulated my own vision for, and justification of, modern liberalism.
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