Not sure if this is a liberal or conservative statement.
I don’t want to be a cowboy, I want to be a mythology. I like the trucks and freedom of working for myself, the digging through the garbage for treasure, the freedom that comes with choosing my jobs and my hours.
With two suitcases in hand I got on a train in Boston and rode across country heading down the steel rails into the west. It was 2001. That was part of the myth. If I can become a successful business man running a company I created I will have completed my mythology. Leave home, head west, become successful in business.
This journey I want for myself is the same journey our country took. It left home, it went west, it became extremely successful in business.
It’s the success I fear because it goes from a journey of personal freedom to a story of domination over others. Is that the highest stage of freedom – strength over others?
It’s the 4th of July birthday I have I think that makes me want to be America’s myth lived out in person. Had I been born in June or August perhaps I wouldn’t obsessed with independence and America and freedom.
Recently I was told my blog should be more political. I feel like my life choices are a political statement. I left a conservative place for a liberal place. I moved to be in a community where leaders represented my ideals. I’m supporting the beacon of hope that is San Francisco’s myth to the rest of the nation: all are welcome. People are more important than corporations. We’re trying new ideas, letting humans be more self determining.
A pal says San Francisco has become a sanctuary city for the rich. He’s leaving for the East Bay where the melting pot is boiling and not a tenancy in common that got it’s start by evicting a poor family.
So it’s time to get more political after all. I want more from my new home and I want it to lead the rest of the country. Let’s not see it become a soulless tech lab reaping profits from patented gene therapy and technology that takes farther away from human touch.
I’ll tell ya what I’d like to see. A ban on consumer plastic. Leave it for medical devices, space travel, military use, and the like. Have it tracked and disposed of as vigilantly as nuclear waste. The stuff is making consumption too easy, outsourcing cheap, and destroying the environment.
Illegal immigration is a hard one. For the most part they are working hard doing jobs most Americans won’t do. But isn’t that because they’ll do it
for less than a living wage? If all ditch diggers got paid a Union wage, a lot of people I know would do a day laborers work. Cheap labor devalues it to the point you’re better off collecting unemployment.
Health care? I’m not sure why socialism is such a bad word to Republicans. The police force is a socialist institution. How about the military? It has a nearly Communist structure. You are told where you’ll live, and what work you’ll be doing. You shouldn’t question their orders. If a Communist institution can protect freedom, why can’t a socialist institution care for the health of a democratic society?
Then there is religion. I don’t understand why Christians are so often Republicans. Would Jesus want universal health care or would he argue that the rich shouldn’t pay for the poor’s problems?
Republicans and corporations are so intertwined and if they are also so fundamentally Christian, it seems like a paradox. Wouldn’t preachers preaching the good news for modern men be chastising corporate leaders for their greed? So why do Christian Republicans celebrate their successes? Why do they want corporations to have so much freedom to make profit when the Bible warns about the evil of money, the sin of avarice and greed? Don’t they believe
it’s so hard for rich men to get into heaven and so easy for camels to get through the eye of a needle?
Democrats? the most terrible politicians there are. Double agents, liars and turn coats. A type of slum lord on the national level. Abolitionists with slaves. They claim to represent the worker, the immigrant. They stand up for nothing.
I’m waiting for the Green Revolution, where we stop being a consumer oriented society and work on becoming a sustainable species.
This from the man with an iPhone
Comment by Lyle_S — March 24, 2010 @ 5:49 pm
You can go back to writing about mannequins now.
Comment by oggy — March 24, 2010 @ 5:59 pm
Tough crowd. I’d like a paragraph from each of you telling me your opinions on illegal immigrants.
Comment by Rolston — March 24, 2010 @ 7:31 pm
Totally agree with your opinions on the Republicans; they are in bed with corporations. And it is religion for the sake of making yourself look better than someone else, not for piety and helping out your fellow man. It is so backwards. The more you look at Republicans, the more you realize they are very good at one thing: throwing mud. If there is any way a situation can be made to look bad, or one example out of a bunch of successes didn’t work – the Republicans will be yelling it all over. You won’t find any useful suggestions – they aren’t about that.
The Democrats are supposed to stand for the common man. But faced with the Republicans, who put down any attempts to do so (and succeed), they feel like the guy who’s in a gun fight but not allowed to pull the trigger because he’ll kill someone against his religion. So they end up looking lame, when really what America needs is someone to stand up for the little guy, instead of crushing him more. As for standing up – well, Obama did just that – he stood up with his bill for health care. He was forced to give some to make it pass, such is life, but he did pass it, and stood up for what he though was good for the country. (And finally the US is closer to having health care for everyone, something all other industrialized countries have had for years – the US is so slow sometimes).
The US is so backwards – they are against unions — but who do you think is going to stand up for you? The company? No, they want their profits. The legislators? Only if it looks politically good, and only if it involves lots of people. Not to mention they are half bough out by corporations anyway.
The immigrants situation is bad, and there aren’t any great solutions, but treating them like they have no rights is just making it easier for corporations to abuse them. Better to let them either get full rights as a work visa, or let them fall under a special law, which gives them limited rights (enough to defend from corporation’s abuses). It would be better also if the whole thing was enforced properly (eg, fines to corporations using such workers without permits), instead of just throwing the immigrants into jail (which punishes the innocent, and continues the cycle of abuse).
Oh, and stop picking on plastic. If it wasn’t used, something else would (unfortunately). Ultimately it is the consumer society that is to blame, buying stuff that is usable only once. Plastics could be recycled, but there isn’t enough money in it yet (guess we need to wait for oil to go up more? or landfill dumping to cost more?), so it isn’t done. By the way, there are ways of making non-petroleum plastics, too.
Best way to start the green revolution seems to do it yourself, unfortunately. All attempts to force things on people seem to backfire a lot. Have you gotten rechargeable batteries? Maybe some cotton washable cloths instead of Kleenex? Switched your bulbs to CFL or LED?
Comment by Belcat — March 25, 2010 @ 8:48 am
Oh, and were you talking illegal immigrants? I was thinking illegal above – Because the regular ones, well, you’re kinda stuck – until the job goes unfilled, the pay won’t go up. And typically only the immigrants will do the low paying stuff.
Comment by Belcat — March 25, 2010 @ 9:40 am
Hi Jon, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I’m waiting to hear back from Rush Limbaugh, Pope Benedict and a few CEOs before I take a stance on illegal immigrants.
It’s pretty clear you don’t know many Republicans (nor does your new friend). I can only hope that when you say Republicans you mean politicians and not party members in general. Truth is, on an individual basis, republican voters give a larger percentage of their income to charity than their democratic counterparts. I think this represents a fundamental difference in how democrats and republicans think. It doesn’t mean republicans are more generous but it can be said to indicate that they want more control over where their contributions are focused, where democrats would rather put their faith in the government to take their money and represent them appropriately.
If you are referring to politicians, make no mistake that all of them are tied heavily to the private sector, while democrats generally are also in the pocket of powerful unions. I don’t think the US is anti-union but certainly unions reach a level of power where their existence begins to eat away at the viability of the industry their workers participate in (see UAW). Corporations are mostly anti-union and Walmart is a good example of the pendulum swinging too far to the right (note that Walmart is a monster contributor to democratic campaign funds). Personally, I like to see the needle try to stay dead center. One side checks the other, at all times.
Comment by Lyle_s — March 25, 2010 @ 11:28 am
One of the long term effects of Illegal immigrant labor that I’ve been thinking about lately is that you have a growing percentage of the working poor in this country who have no vote. It bums me out. Also, I come from a long line of small town New Hampshire Republicans (my grandfather even held local office) who don’t recognize their party any more.
Comment by Nate — March 25, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
There are so many sides to illegal immigration that I don’t know where to begin. For instance, the settlements in Gaza…if you live anywhere west of the Mississippi then you should be thankful for forced annexation, especially if the native population is displaced or killed. Better yet, start a war and then take half a continent as reparations.
I consider myself a frustrated free market capitalist because for free market capitalism to work everyone has to be sober and educated, two traits I rarely see anymore. In a perfect world the best candidate gets the job regardless of nationality. And the job would not involve the polluting the ground water. So what happens when the jobs are so dangerous and destructive that only a starving illegal immigrant would take it? Who the fuck is innocent in such a situation?
Basically, when a percentage or two of the country controls the education, military and manufacturing that everyone else is affected by then we’re all fucked. This isn’t an accident. Far from a representative for of government I think we were sold a lemon back in 1776 that insured a mass of drunk, misinformed couch props who work at factories making incendiary bombs destined for Palestinian streets or Afghan Mosques and applaud the freedom to choose between CBS and Fox. For a long time I thought politics was fucking up…until I decided the master plan they are perfectly executing is so diabolical that it’s unsafe to discuss it here.
Comment by oggy — March 25, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
I wonder what might happen to the illegal immigrant problems if we struck some bargain with our closest neighbors (Canada and Mexico) giving them legal rights to come and work and reside in the US; something that makes it easy for them to come here and work and gets some of their money flowing back to the government for the sunk costs we pay for them today. I suspect you’d find that these now legal immigrants would do a good job of policing any remaining illegals for breaking the rules. Doesn’t get them a vote but these immigrants should know what they’re getting into when they come here so I don’t feel so bad for them. Being a legal worker also provides an opportunity for some level of upward mobility.
I haven’t really thought this through, just an idea.
Comment by Lyle_S — March 25, 2010 @ 6:21 pm