The right wing in our country seems to have its own set of truths. These "truths" have nothing to do with facts. They have everything to do with a warped vision of some sort of make-believe reality that the right wing has made up. They seem to have a set of goals which, they believe, would take America back to the "good old days" that they have imagined. If they could just put actions in place, they think, to take the country back from the "tax and spend" liberals, all would be well. What would such a place be like? We have a couple of examples - incomplete as of yet, but heading in that direction. Let's look at one example.
In Texas, we have the specter of a de-regulated business environment, an inadequately insured work force, poor to nearly nonexistent decent educational opportunities for youth and/or adult learners, and an economy that is beginning to resemble that of the late 19th Century, when workers were poorly paid, unorganized, unprotected, and generally left to the whims of the owner-management classes. Texas is now at the bottom of the heap, along with Mississippi, for the highest percentage of jobs at a minimum wage level. It leads the nation "in the percentage of children who lack medical insurance," according to an editorial in the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson.
The number of young people lacking high school diplomas is over 12% and slated to reach 30% within 20 years - a damning statistic that condemns the youth of Texas to a life of ignorance and prejudice. Yet the current government has slashed educational funding by $4 billion. The governor's response is to call for teaching Bible Creation instead of modern biology. If they do that, students in Texas might as well never apply to go elsewhere to school, since Texas will be on an educational level with the worst third-world nations.
The current governor, Gov. Rick Perry, is running for President and stands a decent chance of becoming the Republican nominee. He advocates doing away with virtually all regulation and permitting the individual states to do things how ever they want to - sort of a throw-back to those wonderful days of 1781 - 1792, when the United States was a solid failure until a revised Constitution could be put into effect that gave much more power to the collective nation.
Perry further states his belief that scientists who hold the climate change is upon us and we are to blame are just greedy people looking to continue getting grant money for their favorite projects - which are all filled with lies anyway. It beggars belief that a man as scientifically ignorant as Perry obviously is makes supposedly authoritative statements about science. If Perry's ideas about science become the law of the educational world, human progress in this country would regress to the dark days of pre-medical science, pre-modern physics, pre-modern chemistry, and pre-modern biology. If Texans really want to be that ignorant, we should, of course, let them. But, Lord, don't let them across the border into the modern world!
In the ancient days, before modern educational institutions arose, the country held a debate over how much education people should receive. The answer, of course, was as much as they want or can handle. There was another side, though, that said education above the absolute minimum needed for manual labor or simple machine jobs, should be denied the "working classes" since too much education might make them want a better life, more leisure time, more "stuff" (which meant more money). An underlying motive behind all of this right wing rhetoric is to return the nation to that place - where the super-rich have 99% of the wealth, and the other 99% of us can fight over the 1% by competing for ever-lower paying jobs. And when companies want to increase productivity, they can squeeze the workers until they quit, then hire new drones at even lower wages.
Well, I'm an old man, now and I've had what little time in the sun I will ever have. But I love this country enough to have offered to die for it and I'll be damned if I'll let the right wing destroy the last, best hope for all of humanity. 'nuff said for one night.
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