Editor: No more coral reefs. Polar ice caps melting apace. Planet warming; oceans rising. Fish stocks in the oceans rapidly dwindling or fished to extinction. Oceans filled with islands of plastic garbage. Nuclear waste from reactors and no technology to safely store it. Air, water and ground pollution from the production and burning of fossil fuels, pesticides and industrial waste. This is our world today.
What is being done at the national level to address these profound problems seeing as how we are major players in all those conditions? Almost nothing.
On the political scene, Republicans in Congress and the current batch running for president are simply nuts; the only ones with modicums of sense being Romney, Huntsman and Santorum, and their economic solutions are provably ludicrous. The Democratic politicians have been basically of little help. This is our nation today.
There are solutions to our problems on a global scale, and nationally as well, but is there any visible evidence the nations of the world or our leadership in government are acting to solve these problems? Not so you’d notice.
Our best and brightest in Congress argue about birth certificates, toting guns everywhere, who can marry whom, reproductive rights and such, and make pledges to some jerk to never raise taxes NO MATTER WHAT. Not for wars they agreed to fight, not for job producing measures, not for education, not for clean air and water, not for safe foods and safe air travel, not for any single good and needed purpose.
Republicans are the Party of No. No Social Security, no Medicare, no public education, no labor rights, no health care, no government services except defense and the massive security apparatus. Everything else can and should be privatized, say they. And the Democrats cannot be counted on to fight for and protect what has been historically understood as government’s primary duties and functions.
Republicans are the party of: we don’t care about you; you’re on your own. They do not believe that it is our responsibility to care for one another, especially if that person is unknown to us. It comes down to just that – either you care or you don’t. Which kind of a world do you want to live in?
Will Shonbrun
Boyes Hot Springs
Will, what’s new? Your particular version of “the sky is falling” amidst the myriad of everybody else’s…anyone who has been around the block, at least on foot instead of rubbernecking it through the window of a limo pulling into the Mission, in times recent knows that politics in this country is about as foul stenched and crooked as the coast of Connecticut at low tide….and now it seems to me that, wasn’t it you who emailed me a couple years ago or so that “politics is the warp and woof (or is that goof?) of life in America”? Well it’s certainly warpage alright.
Now see, right there, Will, this is why responding to a so- called “progressive” or “liberal” (as hideously as that term has been abused) like yourself makes one feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony….one just simply does not know where to begin….
You make a remark like that and evidently yet ironically don’t realize the sick truth of what you are saying —or at least were saying back then—-because if it can be truthfully stated that the current scatosphere of politics in this country indeed be the “warp and woof” of anything then it is the tapestry of BALD FACED LIES this country has become, pure and simple…and please take note that I said politics in this country; I did not say “American politics” as there no longer remains a fly speck on this self-serving harlequinade you call the warp n woof of life in this country that could be called “American”.
I would like to see you try to convince the people of Belgium that they need politics in their lives (like an AIDS epidemic) as at last check, they had gone continuously for ten months without a government—planes still took off and landed without glitch, busses ran on time, people ate Belgian waffles on the street corners and the nation went right on running like a Swiss watch.
So perhaps you are discovering the hard way—as is universal among “liberals”, that this country has become maggot-ridden with sociopathic self-servants at public expense in public office and middle and top level management in corporate boardrooms and this entire country is now paying the price for its blissful somnambulance down the primrose lane to the abattoir.
Robt Hauser
Oh, and by the way, Will, just for the record…I am neither a phlegmocrat NOR a gopster and quite frankly and openly say, as I have for decades, a POX on both your houses. I am a life long union man…and I believe in the letter and spirit of the Constitution…and that by the way is statesmanship, not politics. Nor am I a teabagger—-teabaggers are, quite tragically it turns out, nothing but gopsters in tri-cornered hats marching to the nation’s funeral dirge with drum and fife. I am sad to say that there is not one political party in this country right now that I would trust any further than I could blow it down a two inch fire hose.