Let's Restore Our Natural Solidarity

We have forces in government who are actively destroying the modern state as we know it. The modern state evolved to be increasingly inclusive of all the people who lived within its territory, endowing more and more elements of its population with legal, political and economic rights, as society hoisted itself out of thousands of years of economic and political traditions based on serfdom and slavery. Modern society was a direct departure from Medieval political theories of fixed hierarchy and exclusive privileges. Today we are undergoing libertarian policies that are winding back the clock to the bad old days. If these trends continue unabated, we will find ourselves one day soon without medical care, without free public education, without pensions for those too old to work, without housing and electricity for the poor, without public works, without care and assistance for the mentally ill and the disabled, and with a negligible middle class entirely under direct obligation to the super-wealthy. Never before in the history of humankind have there been so many billionaires and multi-billionaires, but they make up a minor fraction of a population that is growing poorer by the day. Many voters have been duped into believing they can get a real slice of that small elite pie in the sky, and in having their ambitions so tickled, they have voted against those who would have restored or maintained all the services and public infrastructure that would have kept their lives safe, secure, and healthy while they pursued the American Dream. At the same time, big business is pushing hand-picked legislators to create an increasing number of roadblocks to hopeful entrepreneurs seeking to become small organic farmers and improve our homeland food security. These corporate minions and politicians push for financially-burdensome and arbitrarily-justified regulatory laws disguised as "hygienic standards" against struggling small farmers. Yet these same self-righteous folks are incensed if we dare say anything about the abuses of corporate farming/agribusiness in the areas of genetically modified foods, proprietary pollination and DNA-seed patents, and their careless use of toxic/allergenic/carcinogenic chemicals and hormones. We are slipping back into the ills of the pre-Modern state, which stymied upward mobility, and held a low value on labor (even though labor is the very energy and actualization of capital wealth). We still have leaders who believe in the complete enfranchisement of the American people, but our true fighters are too few. Too many who make campaign promises for the improvement of life for ordinary people show themselves to be weak-willed once they get into office. The conservative element wants hundreds of billions for next year's wars to secure oil and mineral resources in the Middle East, but they claim we need to balance the budget when questions arise over the need to improve public health-care and create a green transportation system. And this, after ordinary people paid billions in taxes to bail out the sacrosanct Financial Sector, which has done nothing to reinvest in our country and put people back to remunerative work. Folks, we are going to have to start listening to the old stories handed down through our families, of how they survived, of how they helped each other, of how they fought for their fair share of this world. Easily most of us come from impoverished origins just a few generations back (if we would only admit it). Labor unions changed that, and it is in the positive changes that the legal power of collective bargaining brought to ordinary people from which most families can trace (if they are honest) their ascent into the middle class. Unfortunately, there are now many who look at the middle class as the status their families once enjoyed. But the origins of the labor unions came from a pre-political sense that everyone was in the struggle of life together. People understood that we all came from different ethnic origins, but here we all were working in the same factories, the same shops, the same offices, the same hospitals, the same constructions sites, and on the same road and bridge crews. Our common humanity emerged daily through positive interactions and productive forms of cooperation. This spread to private life, where people helped each other out when they were in a bind, and where they invited each other to their houses for dinner. They created social clubs and charitable organizations that transcended religious and ethnic differences. From this rising sense of common civic pride, the ordinary people no longer felt shame in their status, and they found a common voice when the business owners and plant managers sought to break them back down into the mute servile obedient industrial fodder they had started out as. That voice of ordinary people made itself felt in the political sphere, and politicians realized there was an active element of the population that didn't want to be pushed around anymore, a sizable mass of voters who wanted economic rights and a decent environment in which to lead their daily lives, raise their children and care for their elderly. They felt their work, their contribution to society, was important, and recognized its key importance to the overall success of the economy. Today we need to remember what our ancestors realized: we are all in this together and we all share a common humanity. Together we outnumber the billionaires' club by an overwhelmingly massive proportion, but they will seek to keep us politically divided by playing up our superficial differences. People! We can organize ourselves into a corporate body more powerful than any commercial conglomerate, but to do so, we must learn to love each other first -- no matter what our differences in spirituality, clothes, skin color, dialect, taste in music, or preferences in food. At the center of all things, we all share the same biology, the same brain structure, the same psyches. And we all want to lead a happy and decent life. Let us first learn a solidarity of the heart, and those who oppose us will never be able to break the political solidarity that emerges from that. Only in this way will our political leaders learn to respect us again -- just as they learned to respect our ancestors. Read, listen and learn, and you will discover that our forebears organized a cohesive political community which arose despite the "rules" laid down by the plutocratic game.