All Blog Posts
January 26, 2012
July 23, 2011
July 02, 2011
Blog
Serious Reflections
September 09, 2011 at 5:05 PM
My primary nature was formed in my youth. It is primarily confrontational, laced with youthful testosterone and nourished with John Wayne movies. It is informed by a belief that there is a natural progression in the social order and that reasonable people (like me) need to confront and defeat those forces of reaction that in any way interfere with my classical New Deal view of progress in the world. There is a Utopian aspect to this, but there are certain issues for me for which negotiation and compromise can play no role.
Taking inventory of what I have seen of the vast resources in my country and in the many nations that I have visited, I can no longer find any excuse at all for poverty either here or in the world.
I remind myself that I live in the only Country in the history of recorded history that has declared the pursuit of happiness to be a national goal. And it is axiomatic that there can be no such pursuit while so many of our citizens are drowning in poverty and despair. Our Country must therefore put an immediate end to the permanent war that we are conducting, and apply the resulting peace dividend to fixing ourselves and our system.
We all know what we must do. We must first provide all of our children with the best education that can be imagined. Every child who wants a college education should be provided the opportunity to obtain it without a resulting draconian mortgage to pay for it. We must engage in a Marshal Plan sized program to transition immediately from oil and fossil fuels to clean renewable sources of energy including hydroelectric, solar, wind power, and geothermal energies in the next ten years! We must keep our covenant with senior citizens by strengthening, not altering, social security, medicare, and medicaid.(Raise the $106,000 income cap on the payroll tax to $10,000,000 or more and social security/medicare will be solvent for another 150 years.) We must raise our voices above the lunatic tea bag fanatics and deal seriously and immediately with climate change. We must quit using the tax system as an instrument of social policy, and put in place a progressive income tax system that requires the rich to fully participate, and that stops rewarding corporate manipulation. We must support a system of laws and regulations that promote what we have come to know as the American Dream. We ought to encourage policies and practices that promote home ownership, and the greedy hustlers who gamed the system and brought the economy down with their toxic paper should be criminally prosecuted and their fortunes seized and returned to the general treasury or to the people they cheated. Folks who find themselves "under water" because of illegal or unethical lending practices on their mortgage obligations should have both their principal and interest rates dramatically reduced. The debt and deficit should be seriously addressed as a long term problem, but the more important immediate and short term problem of unemployment must be immediately confronted by a large and aggressive government investment in public works programs that keep teachers in the classroom, cops and firefighters on the street, repairs schools, roads, bridges,and waste water treatment systems, hires and train nurses, specially employs returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and underwrites basic medical and non military scientific research.
My secondary nature is more moderate and forgiving and speaks to me like a Jiminy Cricket sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear. It tells me to slow down a bit, and remember that compromise has been at the root of American success. I must confess that my primary nature almost always prevails over the secondary because of my sense that we are running out of time .So I look for words of inspiration to help guide me through the troubled waters through which we currently sail. The best that I could find come from the closing paragraph of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address which seem especially pertinent to our times:
"With malice toward none: with charity for all: with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds: to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan---to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
We really can do this.
Respectfully,
DAN RUPLI
Comments:
Leave a Reply
Your comments will be posted without prior approval by the administrator, however, Frederick County Democratic State Central Committee reserves the right to remove your comment if it is deemed illegal, objectionable or is of a marketing nature. Otherwise, we do support Free Speech.
