~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The result of the recent election was not figured out by any of the dozens of pollsters before the vote. But after the vote, deducers by the dozens knew exactly what to tell the Democrats they did wrong. The whole lead-up to Nov. 5 was madness that took in millions of dollars to impress the voters, who did not get it either. They were lied to straight out from the one side and totally unprotected from the lies by the timid or deaf on the Left who shied away from printing the lies of the opponents. Maybe like us many voters, they didn’t hear or see the voluminous lies themselves.
But if I could see it, why couldn’t they? There’s an entire other world out there on the Right with its version of the news. That we have two different news sources – one for the Left and one for the Right, does cause problems. People on the Right don’t get lies explained to them, and if they heard a little from the Left about saving democracy, that wasn’t as important as the price of eggs – from what I can tell was because of the pandemic, a bird flu, transportation problems. There was no mention of General Mills price gouging.
Neither side talked about saving their country from the wealthy and their greed and their complete disregard for anyone not wealthy. The election wasn’t really about abortion or non-whites or immigrants. It was about more money for the few and not paying out for the needs of the many,
So . . . this is mainly a column about the Upper class – as in the top 1 percent of the wealth of the country– versus the rest of us. The election itself was about this, although the polls never said so, nor have the after-game opinionaters. The world is, as ever, split right through the middle — envision the Equator – one thin slice which houses the haves, and the hugeness of the rest of the globe north and south being the rest of the humans. The media doesn’t talk much about them – the Uppers – except for the entertainment slice of the news that concentrates on their houses, yacht travels, their parties, their couturier – these are the ones who like attention. There are many of the one percent who dislike being seen or known about at all.
There are, of course, those between the Haves and the Have Nots who make upwards of half a million a year, up to a couple mil a year, say; they’re doing okay. They may own a sailboat, most certainly a boat of some sort. They might have a summer house. Or a winter one. Their kids attend college without too much wear and tear on the family budget. They go to Hawaii for Christmas. They retire comfortably.
But we in the large segments of people on the planet are becoming tired of high prices and our taxes taken out of our paychecks. (Not-rich folks are protesting in Spain, for example, because of the high cost of rents and the lack of housing from the corporations and wealthies buying the houses and renting them out for big gains.) The wealthies don’t have to think of high prices unless they’re buying a Leer, nor do they have to opine about taxes because they often pay none.
Think for a second about one of our recent presidents who claims billions as his own and has yet to disclose his taxes to the public. And I understand that he intends once again to decrease the burden of any more taxes for the wealthies, which would include himself. Fine. All I want is for the wealthies to pay me an actual living wage and if they get a break on their own taxes, they can afford to pay mine.
My truly hilarious friend Rozko told me that he’d figured out that if only the billionaires in the U.S. gave each citizen a million bucks for life, with some kind of cruise control keeping track of how much we citizens spent so we wouldn’t spend it all on one yacht before we died, the world would be happy. “Would they even notice?” he asked me. “There are 335 million of us, and about 800 of them, and a billion has a thousand millions in it.”
The next part of our conversation centered on what he’d just talked about: how quickly could they find us and get rid of us via one of their class member’s spacecrafts? As soon as they got word of our banter, we’d be on our way to another galaxy. We talked about where we could hide. How we could change our looks. Maybe our genders. We could move around a lot. Maybe live in the Amazon. In the tombs of the Coliseum. In some “No Tourists Allowed” niche at Machu Pichu.
Ever since the election, I’ve been wishing for a John Locke, an Englishman philosopher of the 17th century. We need someone of his compassionate genius who has high principles about protecting people’s basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law. Locke’s ideas have yet to fully work for us, even though the writers of the Constitution of the United States of America took accurate aim at them with its truths that are self-evident: that all men are created equal . . . with certain unalienable rights . . . such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is such a lovely bunch of words, high-minded, forming a moral compass for us all, a standard that the world could rely on, to its immense relief. All these thousands of years of warring at an end; prosperity spread thick and even. Why would the wealthy even care if we were happy?
America has been fighting for this since its inception, struggling against the world’s evil side, falling backward, leaping forward, dizzying ourselves with our lack of resolve. But we have valiants among us, for we continue against the odd and unhealthy loudmouths we wind up with now and again. Like another Englishman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Second World War, who spoke with all his fire and might against the attacking Germany Nazis: “. . . we shall not flag nor fail . . . this is a war of the unknown warriors . . . let all strive without failing in faith or in duty . . . and the dark curse . . . .will be lifted from our age . . . .”
Good hi-falutin’ words that we wish we’d said – but that we can repeat at any moment, to help us along — until a John Locke shows up with words of a deep thoughtfulness to soothe the Haves and the Have Nots alike. And a Winston Churchill to speak up, by god, to spur us on with justified angry wit that might give us cajones big enough to fight once more against the lyin’ Nazis.
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Of course, I’m leaving out human behavior, something we’ve not figured out yet; greed is a part of all of us. But so are the good instincts.
