Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

There are times when I feel caught between two different forms of madness, both derived from a species of deliberate ignorance. On the one hand we have an array of Wall Street businessmen eating lunch at a fine restaurant in Manhattan, who consistently replied to an National Public Radio interviewer that they "deserved" to be bailed out by taxpayers because they are the "intelligent ones" who actually run the country, and that they owe the American people "nothing", not even a thank you. How much self-deception can Wall Street businessmen baste themselves in before the fire of truth penetrates their monstrous egos and restores their sense of soul-saving humanity? Then on the other end of the spectrum we have the common run of folk whose ancestors were saved by FDR's New Deal, whose ancestors had a better quality of life because of Labor Unions, who benefit from Medicare and Social Security, and yet they oppose those who would bring about economic reform to save and renew the working and middle classes. We have a country that is gradually rolling itself back into a more primitive reality that can only lead to living conditions as bad as the nineteenth century. The elite are opposing the rebuilding and improvement of our country's infrastructure, and they are gathering the support of those that stand the most to benefit from such reconstruction by telling them that the "decent regular American" doesn't need government, most especially "its helping hand". They also slyly imply that regular people do not really deserve help (either from the public or private sectors), and can only have social worth if they remain self-reliantly impoverished. They play upon false pride, false shame, and sucker their supporters into settling for a degenerating quality of life. How much misery must people be duped into suffering before they realize they must vote for those who are trying to give them the means to succeed? In the meantime, the rest of us feel a tremendous and frustrating loneliness in the vital knowledge that we must learn to love each other and love our country again through our sovereign democratic government, in order for true human progress to happen. Will there be anything left when this meat-grinder of converging forms of ignorance has done its worst? Or will the ship we are on find a happy passage to escape the Devil's monetary stranglehold and the Deep Blue Sea's hurricane of hateful (and self-hateful) ignorance? We all share the same DNA, we are all cousins, there is no "other".