Memorial Day

In 2020, the world as one can clearly see that private wealth exists primarily to buy private privilege. The less wealth you have, the fewer privileges you've earned. Up to and including your 'right' to life.

Let all Americans remember that when push came to shove, aggrieved citizens indignantly clutching their 2^nd Amendment weapons of war like those'll save them, have neither the patriotism nor the guts to protect you & yours by wearing a simple cotton mask in public. Today's give me liberty or give me death crowd doesn't know jack about liberty and the death they're inviting isn't merely their own, to which they're entitled. It's yours, too.

Lest we forget…

We the people continue to transfer billions of dollars of our wealth over to multinational corporations to do with as they please. At the same time, venerated 'Main Street' – the regular folk from small businesses to family farms, minimum wage workers to first responders – must fight over scraps.

Many in Congress believe that measly $1,200 they sent you was sufficient to buy our complicity. Come November, we must disabuse them of that notion.

During this pandemic, people of color and other underprivileged citizens die of Covid-19 at a far greater per capita rate than even the most modestly privileged among us. For the same reasons as that, while fighting the worst public health crisis in 100 years, United States medical workers – those citizens currently putting their lives most at risk for rest of us - are being laid off by a healthcare racket designed to profit from perennial illness.

And if you've never wept for Native Americans, take a moment and weep today. What's happening to the Navajo Nation is a national shame that will stain these not so United States until the last.

You know, unless we tell ourselves it didn't really happen. Or that somehow the Navajo brought it on themselves, in which case they deserve it. Fake news, either way.

Lest we forget…

Adam Smith believed Capitalism would liberate a free people "...to feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections…"

John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of ignorance which envelope the future."

Little did those two paragons of Capitalism know about it, eh? Though to his credit, Keynes seems to have had a handle on both the ignorant future and the darkness ignorance breeds.

Never forget…

That in the coming months, when the choice facing American voters is relentlessly framed as being between a free market's too often unaffordable freedoms and the satanic evils of Socialism, those who frame it that way don't actually give a shit about you.

They're the ones who just gave away a bunch of your money to big-assed corporations, again. They're the ones who begrudge your family its access to healthcare, meager though that is for far too many.

Never forget…

That "normal" is only ever what we the people collectively decide it should be.

It's all but certain that in the not terribly distant future, a day will come for people of good will the world over to decide what 21^st Century normal should be. We must stand together now, prepared to seize that opportunity when it comes.

Make no mistake: the old normal would rather we die, than see us once & for all exert the liberty that even they say is rightfully ours.

Never forget.