Rome is Burning

It's good to see that Nero is fidding, as usual. I shouldn't be amazed at how obstructionist some of our elected officials are at this critical time in American history. To be honest, it must be very hard to feel the pain of those of us either out of work or worried about our jobs. To watch the Republicans, and certain Democrats, you would think that we were calmly discussing theory, rather than an increasingly grim reality.

Unfortunately, our national discourse has been out of touch with the reality of segments of our population for years now; just look at the "welfare queens". Rather than deal with the ugly reality of poverty, and the sick fantasy that people on welfare "have it made, we prefer to talk past the reality and pretend that if we deal in abstractions, the problem will fix itself. This demented reasoning, I fear, is being used by our elected officials on the population as a whole. These aren't real people out of work and suffering, no, they are the next generation of "welfare queens:, an abstract faceless problem.

As the Senate and House dither on a stimulus package, real people are losing their jobs, their homes, their creidt. There are real consequences playing out in the public square as our Congress tries to find reasons to not pass the legislation. This is not the time for abstractions, or theories. This is not the time to rewrite pre FDR Amerca and see, for sure, if the conservative fantasy that the Depression wasn't helped by the New Deal. Now, as then, real people were on the line. We have got to stop being willing to label segments of our popuation as expendable. This expendable fantasy is dangerous, because when the chips are down, as they are right now, those of us without political influence are becomming increasingly aware of how expendable we are to our congressmen.