IS DISCRIMINATION CHRISTIAN?

     Would it really surprise us to hear from Christians that they do not believe in discrimination?  And yet, to no one’s surprise, who knows a little bit about the history – not the propaganda – of Christianity, to learn that Christianity was founded squarely on discrimination.  By God, it sure is.  We are surely aware that Christianity is little more than a chip off the old Judaic block.  If we remember a little about the Old Testament, we must recall how Moses went up to Mt. Sinai/Horeb and brought down ten tablets, later known as the Ten Commandments, a deal made between Moses and Jehovah, that is, a contract between Jehovah and His People, the Jews, not Arab Moslems, not British, not Americans, not Chinese, not Buddhists, not Gnostics, not Manicheans, not Mithraists, not Sufis, and certainly not Christians – only Jews.  Since they were the “chosen people of God (Jehovah, not Allah, not God the Father, not the Holy Ghost, not Jesus Christ),” the Jews had to keep clean and their distance from all others, or what has been covered by the over-all label of “Gentile.”  Like it or not, that is discrimination.

     For Christianity to get off to a viable start, the early Christians had to do likewise, show their superiority, criticize, and condemn all those who did not believe in their new path to salvation.  Like it or not, that is discrimination.  But what doe it matter?  They are all doing nothing more than peddling myths.  It is not important whether the Jews or Christians are discriminatory.  What is important is to understand what is discrimination and why.  Luckily our answers derive from the examples we have just given: to lord over other people we see and consider as inferior to ourselves and treat them as inferior, and even worthless.  We need only point to the slaughter of the Pagans, Gnostics, and Jews by the Christians during the first centuries of the new religion, Christianity.  Then, of course, there are the many centuries of the holy work of the Holy Inquisition, which we can argue wasn’t done by Christians but by fanatic Catholics.  Sorry, but they are two peas from the same pod.  Just to skirt any further argument on that point, we can always point to Salem, couldn’t we?  There were the “superior” and “inferior” ones, the former discriminating against [persecuting] the latter.

     Do we not see these same patterns all around us in our daily lives?  Think about the differences in races, and today in ethnic groups or classes.  Do we not see this same thing happening between “whites” and the “darkies” and the “have’s” and the “have not’s” every day in our lives?  For centuries we saw the Negroes as sub-humans and treated them like slaves, if not animals?  In fact, we often treated our animals far better than the Negroes.  Why?  Because we white folk thought blindly of ourselves as superior and saw them as inferior, people we could abuse or take advantage of for our purposes or at our pleasure.  Doesn’t that fit the same pattern?  We even try to justify our perfidy and meanness by referring to the Bible.  After all, we can’t go wrong there, if we have the divine authority to support our vile actions.  Then there are the noble examples we have had throughout our history.  Did we not cut the Negro right out of our Constitution, though we talked about how “all men are equal under God” – except for the Negro?  We also have the excellent example in glorifying the “Robber Barons,” who steamrolled over their “inferiors” – those who were not among the “elected?”  In fact we have statues, universities, and charities built in their name, do we not, like Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al?  Where they not the ones who bloodily crushed all competition and had the workers in rags and beaten brutally for striking for decent wages and human working conditions?  Yes, we have admirable examples to show us how to discriminate, humiliate, and dehumanize our fellow creatures.

     So, why do we make such a fuss about discrimination anyway?  Aren’t we going to discriminate against the next inferior person that dares to be our equal or stand in our way?  Of course we are.  When don’t we?  Oh, you’re not going to let some superficial “politically correct” nonsense stand in your way, are you?  Heaven’s, no!  We save and play such hypocritical charades when we’re out in public in the glare of the limelight and likely to be criticized by our peers for revealing our hypocrisy.

     We see such hypocrisy all the time “in private,” when no one is around who will condemn us.  For example, there are many cases in which among themselves they are free to call Negroes “niggers” to express their true attitudes and feelings, just as the reverse is also true of Negroes who speak of whites in private as honkies.  There is at present in Dallas a “much ado about nothing,” but it seems quite a to-do among the people involved: a “war” between Black and Latino kids in the pubic schools.  Where do the kids get these attitudes if not from their good Christian parents?  Obviously, somebody feels superior to his inferior.  Does it matter who is inferior and who superior in this particular case?  Of course not.  The point is that it happens everywhere, all the time.  So, we ask the question again: why do we make such a fuss about discrimination, when we are all party to it, and it will go on – forever?  Consider what we see every day in our media headlines after thousands of years of philosophy, theology, religion, the [worthless] Civil Rights Act, the finest educational systems, and a world that has reached the highest form of civilization, we still have wars, riots, looting, patricide, matricide, fratricide, sororicide (sister), uxoricide (wife), mariticide (husband), infanticide, (and after we’ve killed off the rest of the family) suicide, massacre (like when we take an automatic weapon into a school cafeteria and shoot at anyone in sight), and genocide.  Why not, when we hate our “neighbor” as much as ourselves?  It’s the Christian way, isn’t it?

     Is there a lesson to be learned in all this?  I doubt it.  But we can always hope “and pray” that someone [in a laboratory?] will invent a new human being.  Not another monster with our Frankenstein genius, for heaven’s sake!

Antidote for Obama Is a Return to Bush . . . that is, Perry

     Since Rick Perry threw his hat in the ring, much ink has been spilled proclaiming his sterling virtues or warning the innocents of the terrifying thought of dredging up the specter of Bush all over again in the ghastly form of Perry.  Let’s talk about some of Perry’s ideas, claims to the presidency, and his unembellished accomplishments.

     Omitting the political rhetoric and Perry’s campaign propaganda, let’s review and note some of the things reaching the media and others that somehow got lost.  For those who believe that America is too immoral and needs much more religion to educate our children and bring more ethics into government, and that we ought to take government out of business, which needs our loyal and dedicated support to create the jobs we desperately need, Rick Perry is very definitely your boy.

     Since most people gloss over the newspaper headlines or sound bytes we get in the media, we can well believe that some of the more telling points being made have sailed over their heads.  Take the matter of the Christian Dominionists practically  running the campaigns of Perry and Rep. Michele Bachman [who will soon become an also-ran as Perry walks away with the trophy as No. 1 Republican candidate for  president].  Many people are well aware of Perry’s invitation to as many people as possible, especially to the moneyed Conservatives, to his religious rally recently, which [only incidentally] was organized by dominionists.  But how many people who heard about it or were carried away by it know what the term “dominionist” means?

     Some people consider dominionism nothing more than a technical term.  Even some dominionists make the claim.  It is an academic term for a strain of evangelical Christianity that mandates believers to take over the institutions of society in order to implement God’s law on earth.  This thinking flows from the theology of Christian Reconstructionism, whose proponents see as their ultimate goal: the reconstitution of Biblical law as the law of the land.  This all began when in the 1960s the religious right saw that it needed the kind of organization that would give it much greater political clout.  The work of such leaders as Rousas John Rushdoony, father of Christian Reconstructionism, Francis Schaeffer, dominionist and strong crusader against abortion [major influence on Michele Bachman, as even her son Frank will attest], and Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, gave form and substance to this new movement in the 1970s.  We should not forget to underscore the object of Perry and his dominionism: take over the institutions of society and to reconstitute the Biblical law as the law of the land.  So much for the separation of the Church and State and freedom for non-believers.

     One can only wonder, how can they pull this off in such “an enlightened age?”  For one thing, that dominionism should have emerged in the 1970s in the first place and to have evolved so far hardly says much for the enlightenment of our electorate.  We need also remember how religion played such a telling role during Bush’s watch: he was even hearing the voice of God directing his strategy.  There are more ties and similarities connecting Perry with Bush.  Note: like Bush, Perry’s chief support by far for his political campaigns and maintenance is Big Oil; denials to the contrary [in an effort to distance himself from the unpopular Bush], their intimate friendship and political association goes back decades; Bush’s former strategist Karl Rove has said in an interview on Fox [where else?] that Bush “moved heaven and earth” to get Perry elected Lieutenant Governor of Texas; like Bush, Perry preaches the smallest government.  But that to them doesn’t mean the public sector but the private sector, for the public sector grew twice as large as the private sector: the better to carry out his will, though providing considerably less for government services and programs that would help the needy, children, students, and others.

     The Tea Party, another recent phenomenon, since the inauguration of Obama, was lightning fast and effective in the 2010 mid-term elections, installing a large number of conservative Republicans around the country.  It is solid in Texas, hence who is there to say “no” to Ricky boy?  Whatever good ideas the Tea Party may boast, they are dressed and bent on destroying our country as we knew it before Reagan and their eminence grise appearance.  Perry buys the Tea Party philosophy: Halt ALL Regulations, effecting protecting our air, water, and food.  Perry asked Obama to put a moratorium on all regulations, which would mean: USDA would stop checking for food safety; NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; FDA would stop approving drugs & preventing human experimentation; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attack; Library of Congress would stop lending materials for the blind; Treasury would stop printing currency; HHS would end Medicare payments, no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks; EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Federal Reserve System would be shut down.  [Doesn’t that get us a bit closer to a Theocracy?]

     Perry along with his Tea Party support system not only believes Social Security is a ponzi scheme but totally unconstitutional.  Someone brought it to his attention that the Constitution says that “the Congress shall have the Power To lay and collect Taxes . . . to provide for the . . . general Welfare of the United States,” to which Perry unabashedly said, “I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health.  What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. . . . I stand very clear on that.”  It may be clear to someone who does not understand English.  But it seems that when the Constitution says, “the Congress shall have the Power,” it clearly means to anyone conversant with English “the Congress of the United States,” not of each individual state.

     In tandem with the Tea Party, Perry insists also: “I don’t think the federal government has a role in your children’s education.” Among other things such madness would be the total elimination of federal student loans, Pell grants, and billions in federal education funding.  Another tiny wrinkle to this kind of thinking means that the countless numbers of students in our poor states would suffer even more than they do now with federal funding, because each state would have “the power” to impoverish the less fortunate generations of our American youth [which means all young Americans in all our states], if we still mean we live in one country.  Not to overlook Perry’s performance in Texas education, we should note that Texas boasts one of the lowest universal tests in the country – and only ten years in office.  We dread to think what would happen to Texas education if he stayed the course for another ten or more years!

     More specifically, we can glance briefly at Perry’s record as governor of Texas.  He has been tooting his own horn around the country to advertise to everyone that he is the man to lead our country, because of his magical work that makes Texas great.  We don’t want to say he’s disgracefully mistaken or a liar – yet!  He is running on a sham record: he boasts that Texas with 10% of the country’s population has created 37% of net new jobs in the U.S. since the recovery.  Sounds impressive to be sure.  But what are the unadulterated facts about this “job growth?  Such mirage growth, for which he can hardly take credit, is due to recent massive increase in the state’s population, much of it the result of Hispanic immigration.  Texas’ unemployment rate, however, has risen while those jobs were being created.  But what in reality are we talking about when speaking of this “job growth” – lots of professional jobs with big pay and benefits?  Nein!  Texas leads the nation in poor minimum-wage jobs without benefits!  These highly coveted jobs increased by 150% between 2007 and 2010.  Is that what we want for America?  Something else to which Perry cannot take credit is the boom in energy prices happening in his oil and gas-rich Texas.

     Perry boasts that he operates by “just really pretty simple guiding principles”: 1. Don’t spend all the money, 2. Keep the taxes low and under control, 3. Regulatory climate is fair and predictable, 4. Reform the legal system so frivolous lawsuits don’t paralyze employers trying to create jobs.  To be expected, some people are going to be sold on this myth, like gullible and propagandist Newt Gingrich who spoke on Fox News [where else?]: “I know how to get the whole country to resemble Texas.”  Well, let’s see how well these “pretty simple principles” are working for Perry and his captive state and what Gingrich promises for our country:

1.      Texas leads the country in percentage of its population without health insurance.

2.    Only one state covered a smaller percentage of its poor with Medicaid.

3.      Texas leads also in percentage of children without insurance.

4.      Texas is last in the number of women receiving early prenatal care.

5.      Ranks sixth highest rate of infectious diseases in U.S.

6.      Ranks 35^th in number of children being immunized.

7.      40^th in overall health services.

8.      9^th lowest level of health care spending per person.

9.      36^th in the nation in terms of high school graduation are.

10.  Lowest rate of the population aged 25 and older with high school diploma.

11.  Texas students have the sixth lowest SAT in the nation.

12.  Texas boasts fourth in teen pregnancies.

13.  Has the 16^th highest crime rate.

14.  17^th in occupational fatalities.

15.  Tied with Missouri for 19^th in citizens needing food stamps.

16.  Texas sits at the top of recognized carcinogens released into the air.

17.  4^th for highest amount of toxic chemicals in the environment.

18.  Per capita income growth, Texas was 8^th SLOWEST in nation between 1998 and 2008.

19.  Ranked 47^th in median household net worth (averaged 2007-9).

20.  Only seven states have a higher percentage of children in poverty.

21.  Only nine states have a higher percentage of people of all ages living BELOW THE POVERTY LINE.

                                         (Compiled by Peter Montgomery at Right-Wing Watch)

Very typically of Conservative government – which consistently provides slow growth, poor social results, greater inequality, and less protection for workers and our environment – Perry’s candidacy is rich in these glowing promises.  These statistics speak louder than Perry’s slick words on his campaign hustings and claims of great achievements during his governor’s reign.  [Contrary to Perry’s thinking, would not the country gain by having a President who would use that Constitutional Power and Mandate to make all the states of the nation EQUAL to the Number One state in ALL the above-mentioned categories rather than to have such a disgraceful disparity we have today among the states?]

     As a short endnote to close the book on brother Perry, we might touch on his handling of his own state budget, which might suggest how we can expect him to handle a much larger one given the one of our country.  In his last State of the State speech, he talked about the $27 billion budget shortfall facing the Texas legislature.  “Now, the mainstream media and big government interest groups,” he declaimed, “are doing their best to convince us that we’re facing a budget Armageddon.”  More than with a touch of braggadocio, he assured his captive audience that, “Texans don’t believe it and they shouldn’t because it’s not true.”  Well, is he as big a liar as Bush, or bigger?  [You decide from the following.]

     The budget shortfall Perry blatantly denied is not only a reality but a consequence of one of his own smoke-and-mirror legerdemain schemes to squeeze money from a stone, where there is none to be had: his “business margins tax.”  This came as a result of the fact that Texas is one of nine states without income tax; hence many public services, especially public education, come from property taxes, which are high in this state.  Perry, to pull off a bit of razzle-dazzle, called a special session of his [“stacked”] Congress to reduce property taxes with this “margins” tax, which would provide enough revenue to reduce property taxes.  No one in his Congress believed it could work.  State Comptroller Carole Strayhorn sent him a letter telling Perry that: “your plan [in 2008] is $3.4 billion short; in 2009, it is $5.4 billion short; in 2010 it is $4.9 billion short, and in 2011 it is $5 billion short.  She added that these were “conservative estimates . . . The gap is going to continue to grow year by year.”  The shortfall the bill created could only be closed by TAX INCREASES “or massive cuts in essential public services – like public education.”

     Houston Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg, Legislature’s resident authority on public-education finance, said in an interview, “Every official document predicting the state’s financial crisis at the time (2006) predicted exactly what happened.”  In a small meeting amongst the legislators with Perry, Scott asked him if he was not aware that his tax bill would not produce the revenue promised.  Perry answered, “Scott, use your common sense.  Don’t you know that when we cut property taxes we will see such an economic boom that you will never even notice the drop in revenue.”  Not only did Perry know what a sham his bill was, but that the great vision of his bill has NOT produced anything resembling a “boom” but rather a horrendous depression, especially in the housing industry and has produced a more severe financial crisis than before his brainstorm.  Perry and all the people afraid to vote against him [like the Tea Party House members who said en masse, “I’m not going to vote against the governor”], when confronted with the obvious loss of revenue, keep using the escape hatch “we will grow out of it.”  Rather than grow out of it, everyone with the courage to say so, talk about how “the gap is growing year by year,” as Strayhorn had predicted.  That explains briefly Perry’s method and way of thinking.  Even with stimulus money to cover the gap keeps growing as predicted at a rollicking pace.

     The gap has been partly covered not with Perry’s economic wisdom and strategy but with Obama’s federal $17 billion stimulus money.  But Perry refused to accept the $555 billion federal stimulus money Obama offered designated for the extension of benefits to the unemployed, hiding behind the excuse that it had strings attached.  Democrats believed otherwise: that he did not accept this latter stimulus money because it would be too much like helping the worker rather than the employer, the one who is more likely to shell out the big money for his campaigns.  The continued shortfalls and loss of stimulus money is costing SO FAR, the loss of 12,000 teachers, 6,000 state employees, many university professors and other university employees [and Perry boasts about creating jobs; he doesn’t mention the jobs lost because of him]; Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals have been cut; and the last four months of Medicaid payments in the fiscal year 2012 were not funded.

     Then finally there is the state’s “Rainy Day Fund.”  Despite the clamor from the teachers and other employees, to say nothing of cancelling programs and supplies, Perry refused adamantly to use any part of the $9.5 billion Rainy Day Fund; it was absolutely “hands off,” at least in part because it is funded by oil and gas taxes.  He finally agreed “to touch” the Fund of $3.2 billion only because even his own minion Republicans urge him to cover part of the current fiscal year’s deficit, but nothing for the next biennium when the state’s public schools will be short $5.7 billion.  When the Legislature convenes in 2012, it will face a shortfall of $10-18 billion, plus the $4.8 billion in Medicaid expenses it failed to fund this year.  Can we imagine how delighted teachers and many others will be with that additional shortfall?  Perry bragged about how Texas was going “to do more with less.”  The truth is that he has done much less than ever by taking from the poor to give to the rich.  What American voter doesn’t want a president with such magical powers of administration?

     Finally, everyone around Perry is up on to his game: collaborates with the private sector to create jobs and to attract jobs from [at the expense of] other states.  The Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technologies Fund, his personal brain-children [or monsters], are geared to do this heinous hatchet work – for a hefty price, of course, which operate on a “trickle-up economic theory”: the state takes money from the taxpayers and gives it to corporations to entice them to create jobs.  Perry hands over millions to corporations, whose executives have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.  With a war chest like that he can buy his way into the White House with taxpayer money and fond wishes – the American way.  With all the power in his hands, Perry proposes and Perry disposes, all in closed meetings.

     The Texas Enterprise Fund started in 2003 with $285 million from the state’s Rainy Day Fund, the same Rainy Day Fund “off limits” to public schools, then withdrew $161 million from the Unemployment Compensation Fund in 2009.  Texans for Public Justice (TPJ) did its own audits of economic development funds in 2009 and found that the number of grant recipients were not fulfilling their obligations from 42 to 66 percent, and found that when companies failed to meet their contractual obligations to provide jobs, the governor’s office with alacrity “discreetly” [so the public would not know] rewrote their contracts.  How’s that for doing business the political way?  What taxpayer is not delighted to know how honestly his hard-earned money is being spent?

     Just two examples to see how well this tax money is spent.  Motiva Enterprises is a joint venture of Shell Oil and the Saudi-Arabian oil company Aramco.  Texas gave Motiva $2 million to create 300 jobs through a $3.2 billion project at Port Arthur.  Motiva was hardly likely to move to another state with such money invested at Port Arthur and operating with such billions, so what desperate need would it have for a mere $2 million, which the Texas taxpayer could have used for needier purposes, especially when Shell’s reported earnings at that moment were $6.3 billion?

     In 2005 Texas taxpayers cheerfully gave Washington Mutual $15 million to open a new facility in San Antonio, when WaMu had $300 billion in assets, $188 billion in deposits, and 43,000 employees, and was in the process of dumping its 30-year-fixed-rate mortgage portfolio to clear the books for high-risk subprime loans, a financing of “toxic financial products that sucked equity and wealth out of hundreds of thousands of people, not only in Texas, but nationwide.”  Moreover WaMu was also consistently missing its job targets.  TPJ not only found that the governor’s office was not only amending its contract, but allowing aggregated part-time jobs to count as full-time jobs.  What better qualifications for a U.S. president?  We have criticized presidents and politicians at all levels throughout our glorious history, but Perry is if not honest, he is certainly slick, especially with the Dominionists and the frantic Tea Party behind him.

     Perry has criticized Washington and pictured himself as anti-Washington during his reign in Austin.  When he sits on the throne in Washington, is he still going to be anti-Washington or ensconced comfortably where he has always dreamed of being?  Well, supposing that he does get elected and insists on being anti-Washington, does that mean that he is going to operate outside and independently of Congress?  Who can do that successfully – but a dictator?

Key words: Perry, Bush, Dominionism, religious-right, Tea Party, Conservative-right, Christian-right, religious rally, budget, deficit, education, Texas, Constitution, federal, power, presidential candidate, Michele Bachman, Democrats, Republicans, corporations, Obama, stimulus money, Rainy Day Fund, jobs, financial crisis, Karl Rove, extremists, big oil, regulations, big government, political rhetoric, teachers, university professors.

TO ABORT OR NOT TO ABORT? THAT IS THE QUESTION

        photo courtesy of http://www.jewsonfirst.org/southdakota.html
 

     There are probably only a few people with an “I don’t know” answer to this question.  In fact, almost every adult has a rather dramatic answer to it.  Most answers, for better or worse, derive from their adolescent knowledge and feelings, many even earlier since they are based mostly on what they learned from their parents in childhood through religious icons and church hymns.  These are the ones whose truth comes through the emotions rather than through the channels of reason, where such may exist.

     Whether adherents of one side of the issue or the other, we mostly believe that we are believers in our Constitution and justice, and that somewhere in all this we have rights, human and civil, as we were recently reminded by the legislation known as the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.  We were all also taught along the way that killing is not only against the law but even sinful.  This general knowledge lies at the root of our problem: to abort or not to abort?  For though we can generally agree that to kill “may be” unlawful and sinful, there is also the additional complication created by the other fact that it is not always unlawful or sinful, otherwise God himself would be the greatest criminal and sinner of all, having destroyed or killed the whole world for disobeying his Commandments and leaving only one family to re-populate the world after the Great Flood.

     Then, of course, there were the many wars or crusades in the name of God that were apparently justified by Church and State through the centuries, right up to the present.  So we can agree that killing is not always absolutely wrong legally or sinful.  We have even allowed for “justifiable homicide” by a private citizen or the police in the line of duty or in defense of a family member or of oneself.  Even when we have wars that are not justified by the label “religious crusade,” we allow the killing of our friends, relatives, and total strangers whom we don’t know enough to hate, all in a “good cause.”  Thus it would be pointless, quite absurd, to point to something like a Commandment and insist that ALL killing in all circumstances is absolutely wrong morally and legally.

     Historically we know that killing has been interpreted differently in different cultures and at different times, whether to cleanse the family honor in a case of rape or seduction or to avenge a murder of a family member.  All these instances find their justification within the cultural code.  The point is that in this country of many cultures, we can scarcely find justification in imposing a personal code on everyone else and claim that it is justified by “our” general belief.  We must make allowances for other beliefs and values.  Consider the other fellow as we should like to be similarly considered, or some form of the Golden Rule we often conveniently forget.

     Before Roe vs Wade (1973) we were still in the Dark Ages, though it seems very much as if we have not budged very far from there the way things are going in our social and political life, for there are sinister steps afoot to reverse the ruling on this emancipating legislation within and without Congress.  The devoutly religious folk would argue that life begins in conception; hence abortion is tantamount to murder in the eyes of God.  Pro-choice proponents insist that at conception the zygote is not only an unrecognizable creature, however human its potential, but not a person, hence abortion cannot be construed as murder.  One doesn’t “murder” uninvited vermin in the basement.  Clearly there is disagreement here.  As a fine gentleman once said, “East is east and west is west, and the twain shall never meet.”

     And so we have Pro-life and Pro-choice.  Given the polarity of these positions, it is highly unlikely that there can ever be a logical agreement.  The resolution must be sought elsewhere, though this does not mean abandoning logic or facts.  We might consider the old American notions of Democracy, Freedom, and Patriotism, or if we care to be a tad romantic, we can call it love of country.  We take pride in living in a country where we can enjoy the benefits of a Democracy and more freedoms than in almost any other country.  And our patriotism shows best when we give dirty looks to anyone who does not stand up and hold his hand to his breast when we sing our National Anthem.

     We believe that going to the polls to vote is not only a privilege but a patriotic duty, and when we vote we are demonstrating Democracy in action.  Now, before the Roe vs Wade case, it was against the law to have or perform an abortion.  Once abortion was no longer unlawful with the passage of the new law, a woman could now have an abortion at will.  In recent years, especially since the conservative Reagan era, there have been various groups militating to over-turn the “offending” law.  This religious zeal has taken various forms, some of which has included killing doctors practicing abortions, nurses, stalking anyone connected with its operation, and bombing such places and cars belonging to such people.  Apparently for these zealots killing unknown zygotes and prenatal creatures is far more evil than killing beloved, educated, skilled, professional [real persons] adults, because it is “in a good cause.”  This is also their version of Democracy-in-action: kill those who vote against us – and their idea of what Christianity really means, barbaric force.

     On the political level, it is clear that if we take this legislation to the polls again we have two postures or “offerings”: (1) to vote Pro-life we impose our religious beliefs on all Americans and deny everyone their right to decide for themselves as adults, and making it against the law – again, a return to the Dark Ages, a loss of freedoms; (2) to vote Pro-choice we [everyone] can decide for ourselves what we want to do about increasing or controlling the size of our families without interference from anyone else or having the fear of breaking the law.  Pro-lifers, like those people who burned you at the stake if you didn’t OBEY the beliefs and practices the authorities were imposing on the whole society, are bent on taking away more and more of our freedoms, those things we felt so proud to enjoy in a free democratic country, while the Pro-choicers are offering us a vote that will allow us retain whatever freedoms are left and still available to us.  Instead of adding unnecessary laws that trammel us at every turn, we should be searching to reduce and eliminate as many that serve only to enslave us even more.

     Pro-lifers want to deny you your freedom, your beliefs, practices, and size of your family THROUGH THE VOTE, using a civilized mechanism of Democracy to deny everyone else Democracy, converting it into a THEOCRACY.  Is that what we salute when we see the American flag, a Theocracy and not the Democracy we have been taught to believe was the aim of our Founding Fathers?  Let reason prevail, lest the dark shadow of the Church loom large and darken our open skies and free horizons once again.

Let’s Get Our Boys Back from Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan TODAY!

    
      If we leave it to politicians to decide when and where the flower of our youth must die and be buried, we are putting ourselves in the devil’s hands.  For they are not guided by reason or moral compunction; they are motivated by their moneyed donors and voter pressure.  But we as voters are, unhappily, guided and moved by the slick tongues of our respected politicians, who promise much but deliver little, when not actually gouging us.

     We have heard the argument that if we leave too soon these barbaric countries will pounce on their neighbor’s jugular in civil war, and we’ll have a holocaust on our hands.  Unfortunately, whenever we leave whether today or ten years from now, they are going to do exactly that anyway.  With those countries overflowing with any number of different religions and sects, and each hating and having hated the others for centuries, because their absolute truths clash with each other, there will be no peace so long as there isn’t a “higher power” [not God but a military force imposed by a “savior,” a strongman dictator as per custom, including the American military] to control them.

     We [gullible Americans] were sold a phony bill of goods, which told us that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and was on the verge of launching them all over the neighboring vicinity and even landing on our shores, like on the Twin Towers.  We were lied to, as per custom, and the quick easy pickings that was to end in no more than a fortnight is still very much with us after about a decade as the body bags and flag-covered coffins attest to as they arrive “back home” regularly from that (coveted) oil-filled land where many of our “missing-in-action” boys will lie under the sands for as long as there are sands there.

     When our president said, “It was worth it” after he was caught in his lie – that there were no WMD – the new plan was to bring peace, democracy, and Christ to all these primitive savages with bombs, missiles, and nuclear power, as we have done in bringing peace, democracy, and Christ to Iraq after a decade of Christian love and diplomacy.  One of our current president’s major mistakes was to continue the war started by his predecessor in Afghanistan.  Rather than set an example for our future policies in that area of the world, we have gotten deeper into the morass, by sending even more troops and imposing our will on Pakistan.  As if our meddling stopped there, we are angling for more entanglements in Iran and North Korea with the same fear tactics of disallowing nuclear power in foreign hands.  After all, how can we trust anyone but ourselves, since we are the only reasonable and honest people?

     Now, it is clear that neither Bush nor Cheney, or Obama is going to send his own children to the front lines.  For anyone who believes in the tales being preached by our political leaders and wants to delay returning our boys immediately, he should volunteer his sons and daughters tomorrow morning to carry on this holy crusade.  We know only too well that talk is cheap.  Let’s put our blood (children) where our mouth is.  It would seem the Christian (and truly American) thing to do is “love our neighbor as ourselves” and let him decide what he wants to do with his life.  In the case where our neighbor (country) is governed by a dictator, we work with him, not destroy him because we don’t agree with him.  After all, would we like to have any country to meddle in our internal affairs, or control us [supposing it had the power to do so], just because it didn’t agree with us or like how we live?  Well, where is the Golden Rule we give so much lip service to?

     In short, every day we prolong these highly costly and fruitless wars even one day longer, whatever our self-serving politicians say, every dead American [and if we were truly human, we would count every Arab killed as well] will be on our alleged conscience.  Or have we forgotten that we’ve been saying for so long that we have one?

Dialectic Dialog The Website!

We are pleased to announce Dr. David Hernandez's personal website highlighting his Works and Words.  Currently, the site is in English, though we are working to get the rest of it translated!  Stop by and see the new look for Dialectic Dialog!  Visit www.dialecticdialog.com!

What’s the Secret, Ben?

What’s the Secret, Ben?

This play is a take-off on Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman.  It does not deal with Willy Loman and his family.  Rather it is the development of Willy’s brother Ben and his life in Africa before his death.  In Miller’s play, Ben, who has been dead, appears as a ghost in Willy’s desperate hallucinations.  In Willy’s conversation with his neighbor Charley, the audience learns that Ben had seven sons, thus Willy does not expect to get any of the inheritance his brother, who had left home at the age of nineteen to search for diamonds in the mines of Africa and came out hugely rich at the age of twenty-one, is likely to leave his family.

We see at the opening of this play Ben contemplating death, because he is dying of cancer.  He is particularly disturbed because he is expecting his sons with their wives to come swooping down from their different perches like vultures to see what they can get out of the old man before he dies.  Little interested in coming to visit Ben while he was robust and younger, now after years of absence they “suddenly” show an interest in his wellbeing.  They do not fool Ben, however, for he is well prepared for their necrophagous visit.

Predictably, the sons, with their wives, begin to arrive faithfully little by little.  It does not take long for them to reveal their true colors and motives, biting each other in the back, each claiming to deserve a hefty chunk of Ben’s estate with passionate and logical justification.  As time begins to drag for their impatience, they begin to plot his murder, since “he was going to die anyway.”  Among them are Ben’s faithful doctor, Harrison, and Rebecca, one of the wives, who has been accustomed to high living but now begins to fall under the spell of unexpected love.  Her new personality begins to insinuate itself in bachelor Harrison’s romantic sensibilities.  There is also the Benjamin of the family, Ben Junior, jazz musician recently discharged from the Army.  His hipster life and bohemian attitude toward life carries a certain sense of justice and genuine love for his “pop.”

The intrigue of the other members of the family pressures Junior into participating in Ben’s murder – passionately against his better judgment and feelings.  The date is set for Ben’s murder: death by poisoning.  Junior and June, one of the wives who has fallen in love with him, are to carry out the nefarious deed by poisoning his dessert.  With so many dishes and servings looking alike, the inevitable happens: they poison the wrong person, Joe.  Unbeknownst to everyone, except his latest wife, Miriam, Ben has been listening to all their secretive plotting conversations with hidden mikes throughout the house.  But Ben was not going to wait to be poisoned “by another hand.”  Because of his unbearable pain, Ben had arranged for Harrison to give him a pill that would relieve his pain permanently.  While Joe is dying from the poison intended for Ben, the shrewd Ben is also dying from the pill he has just swallowed, saying to his dead son, “Don’t fret, son, I’ll be right behind you.”

Under the mistaken [misled] belief that Ben had not yet made out his last testament, the scheming sons had wanted him dead before he could cut them out of his will.  But the last testament has most surprising but revealing contents and conditions.

For more information about this play click here

Standing Room Only

      

What frightens us most today?  Most of us are not always certain what we are frightened most about, just that we feel fear about something, whether it be a fatal disease like Alzheimer’s, a nuclear attack, another 9/11, having a Republican win the next national election – or perhaps something a little less frightening, like a stroke.  Any of these can be more than a little terrifying.  But what is perhaps worse and more pressing than any of these or even all of them combined is something we give little or no thought to: over population.

     Was that a misprint?  No, that was not a misprint.  We need give the matter only a little thought, like never before, and we may come to a speedy agreement that over population will eat us up sooner than AIDS will engulf us.  Let’s consider a simple law of nature: barring a sudden epidemic Black Death to sweep across the world overnight or rigorous intelligent birth control, human growth is exponential.  If we look at a few numbers [statistics], we can see how this has worked since ancient times, no farther back than Greek and Roman times.  World human population was still only considerably less than 100 million people.  In spite of man-made wars and plagues, we are now in the billions.  [We tend to pooh-pooh such numbers when we refer to people but bellow bloody murder if it refers to the national deficit.]

     Today [April 2011] the world population is, specifically, at 6.91 billion.  We were barely over a billion in 1800.  By the year 2050 [within the lifetime of those born in the last 25 years and their children], scientific predictions have us at over 7.5 billion and more likely flirting with 10.5 billion.  [That is still only pocket change for what Bernard Madoff ran off with to rent for himself a nice place in federal prison.]  Well, no doubt, as far as most people are concerned, these are still only numbers, nothing to worry about.  It might do well, though, to look at the matter from another angle.

     Not very long ago, there was a fellow by name Adolph Hitler, and he complained that Germany needed more lebensraum.  Very patriotically, he led his country and went out to obtain that extra “room” or space.  We call that noble effort World War II.  Not enough space, he said.  A few years before Hitler, there was another war.  We have proudly called it The War of Independence, the making of the American nation.  At that time there were only “thirteen colonies” settled in the far Northeast, Yankee land.  To the west was a nearly “boundless” land, totally unexplored by the white man but inhabited by a few million [handful of] “savages” [whom we kindly set aside to make room for the white folk.]  It was long said that from that Northeast corner, there were such thick forests that a monkey [not the Yankee, of course] could swing from tree to tree across the entire land right up to the Pacific Ocean.  How many of us, or at least a good, athletic African monkey, would be able to swing on trees today from coast to coast without our feet touching ground?

     The fact is that we have cut down millions of acres of trees in scarcely over two hundred years.  Why?  To house millions of people who have covered our erstwhile virgin lands.  How about the asphalt and concrete we have poured on them to build our streets, highways, and parking spaces for our cars and trucks?  At the beginning of the 20^th century we had less than 100 million population.  Today we are climbing at 311,191,000 and counting, what with our practically open immigration policies. Where will we be in 2050, especially if we continue to let all the Asian peoples, who are dying to come to the “land of opportunity,” come rushing through our well-oiled revolving door?  China is bulging at 1,343,520,000; India 1,210,193,422; Indonesia 238,400,000; Pakistan 175,791,000, Bangladesh 164,425,000; as well as Africa with Nigeria enjoying 158,259,000 [only one of the countries in Africa] and Ethiopia [the poorest country in the world] with some 60,500,000.  Already the face of America has darkened considerably since the Civil Rights bills of the ‘60s, which allowed for our nearly open-door immigration policies.  Who or what is going to put the brakes on the free flow of poor countries from flooding what remains of our diminishing spaces?  Logic tells us that with our current fiscal deficits and rampant immigration of the world’s poor, it will not take many more generations to qualify as one of the “third world” nations.  And we, too, like Hitler, will be screaming our lungs out for more lebensraum.  Unthinkable?  What odds are you laying on your bet?

     For those who have not kept up with foreign news might want to know that Brazil [population 194,529,000] has been cutting down millions of acres of its Amazon jungles for years for building roads, infrastructure, industries, and homes.  Sound familiar?  The Amazon jungle once provided vital oxygen to our atmosphere, but it is now being transformed into carbon dioxide and other pollutants.  Let us not forget that they and we are only getting warmed up in our mad determination to destroy our world, which includes not only our air but also our waters [oil spills contribute marvelously to the madness; after all, we do need more oil for more people, do we not?], marine life, animals, vegetation, etc.

     Communist China, whatever else we may think or say about it, adopted a policy to control excessive population growth a few years ago: reward those who participate in birth control and ignore the others.  Couples having no children reap the greatest tax and financial benefits; those with one child a little less; those with two even less; and so on.  Preaching never produces positive results.  Money always does.  As soon as possible, we should seriously invest in such a practical program here as well as in poor countries, and close the door to free immigration into this country.  [We can already anticipate interested parties reacting vehemently against such a policy, but it is not a matter of permitting any and all relatives and friends to come live with us, but a matter of survival for legal tax-paying Americans.]  As our worthy politicians say in their political charades “let’s take back our country,” we should take back our land, the natural world around us, and our future before we reach the point of no return.  The handwriting on the wall is writ large enough for a blind man to see.  When are WE going to see it, read it, and act on it sensibly?

   

Celestina

Celestina

Taken from the Tragedia de Calisto y Melibea [published in 1499], which is believed to be the model for Shakespeare’s Rome and Juliet, this play plucks out the minor but one of the most memorable characters in literature, Celestina.  In the earlier work this character appears as an old crone once a successful prostitute, who now serves as a tutor to young girls seeking [“in the life” – prostitution] a means of feeding themselves and perhaps their young families, and is also a mender of hymens for young wayward ladies who are willing and able to pay to have their pure virginity restored.  This play, however, presents a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated girl “in the life,” whose clientele includes successful businessmen, a renowned Archbishop, and politicians.

Opening the play is a scene of Celestina and her mother discussing the merits and demerits of prostitution, the mother wishing that her daughter could have a more respectable career but accepting Celestina’s position: except for our prudery about sex, why is prostitution any less respectable than any other commercial business that sells a valuable product in great demand, especially if the clientele is doubtless respectable?

Celestina has won a respectable place in the community because she does not flaunt her beauty or success, but is obviously appreciated, especially by the men, and also because as a brilliant fundraiser for the Church she has been accepted as a respected member of the Board.  In a meeting with the Board, despite Celestina’s admirable efforts at diplomacy, when the Archbishop feels “attacked” by the subject of the clergy abuse of its young and female parishioners, he explodes in anger a storms out of the meeting.  To divert attention from the growing discontent of the community in the negative publicity about the abuse of young boys, girls, and women in the confessional, the Archbishop publicly announces a campaign to clean the city of all prostitution by closing all brothels and arresting any and all streetwalkers.

Immense pressure is placed on Celestina when she discovers that word has gone out of her abominable “business” and that the Archbishop has broken his appointments with her, however much he craved his masochistic flagellation “therapy.”  Forced to decide whether to allow herself to be run out of town, Celestina elected to go public and name names of her clientele, arguing that if she is guilty, so must her clients who pay for her services.

Not one to take such public disgrace lying down, the Archbishop calls on a couple of his more able henchmen to go teach her a less she will never forget and put her out of business permanently.  They mutilate her so that she will never again be able to sell her wares in the open market.

To get "Celestina" by Dr. David Hernandez, click here!

Seeing Illegal Immigration Right Side Up

How many more wetbacks do we need invading our shores?  Is “illegal” really legal?

     The answer to these questions may not come by so easily because it seems much depends on our various interests and different views.  For example, if we asked the first thousand people we came across in the street what they meant by justice, we would be sure to get a thousand thumbnail definitions as assured as the slick first-rate, highly paid shyster.  Yet it took arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, Plato, a whole book, The Republic, to answer that very question.  Just shows how little we can trust less knowledgeable “experts” trying to answer difficult questions with simple answers.

     While we all have the right of opinion, it hardly means that we all have the right opinion.  Many are bound to clash with others.  And when we are so adamant about clinging to our pet interests, they, too, will clash with those held by others.  In the instant case, we see todAay how our state laws differ and our Congress does little to soften the obduracy of the differing sides in trying to reach a reasonable solution to the benefit of the entire nation, while each side wants and expects to prevail.

     To complicate matters, the exploding numbers of illegals and the numbers of their interested legal advisers, who see gold in defending them and find places in the political system now have more power in determining legislation that favors the illegals and the definition of what is “legal” itself, rendering the question we asked at the start all but moot.

     On the side of the illegals, we hear and can empathize with them in part, when they say, “this nation was founded by and is a nation of immigrants,” “this nation has been made strong and great by its diversity of immigrants,” “we seek a better life, like anyone else – and willing to work for it,” “we pay taxes, like any other American and are not a burden on the State,” “we love this country and will be good American citizens,” “we are human beings who don’t deserve to be discriminated against or to be profiled anymore than any other person,” etc.

     There are many who defend the employer and our country as beneficiary of the work the illegals contribute to our economy.  Among the employers there are the landowners, farmers, restaurants, salons, hotels, resorts, parks, zoos, garbage collection, and construction industries: homes, commercial, streets, expressways, sweat shops that fill our department stores, etc.  Their chief argument is that “it is work that no one else will do,” which means invariably legal [especially “white”] Americans, and it is indispensable work to our economy.

     The first white man who set foot upon the western hemisphere [as unwelcome as he may have been] was surely an immigrant, as were the millions of Europeans who continued flowing upon these shores.  And there was a time when immigrants were in fact greatly needed to work the land and build our infrastructure.  But then came a time when the flow of immigrants had to be stopped, because it was no longer desirable to have endless immigrants bulking our population, for we had reached the point of diminishing returns.  In short, the unneeded, unwanted immigrant was no longer welcome.  The fact that this land was founded by and is made of up immigrants is totally irrelevant to today’s issue of illegal immigration.

     Lawyers who defend illegals do our country a disservice, since they should know better, however much they argue for the “inhuman” hardships the illegals suffer because they are not given the benefits of legal Americans.  They may be human beings, but they are illegal ones.  A murderer is a human being, but that doesn’t make him innocent of crime and eligible for rewards and special privileges.  That they should make good American citizens is more than slightly dubious, since they were ready to abandon their country for “a better life.”  It seems rather that their eagerness to abandon their country makes them opportunists, hardly material for loyal American citizens.

     To say that we need 12-13 million illegals to do the work that “no one else wants to do” is pretty much putting the cart before the horse, is it not?  According to latest figures, there are millions of American citizens out of work and some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, considered “homeless.”  Now, supposing we eliminated those 12-13 million illegals AND closed all the havens for the homeless, would we still have jobs that “no one else wants to do?”  [There would always be some kind of haven for the proven infirm.]  Forgive me if I can’t hear for the deafening silence.

     It’s more than high time that we stopped fooling ourselves and made some sense of the kinds of messes we are quite geniuses at consistently creating for ourselves.  Let’s go back to the “indispensable concept” we proposed for making a start at trying to solve our immigration crisis.  We mentioned the next thousand people we met would give us a thumbnail definition of “justice.”  Yet, arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, Plato, needed a whole book, The Republic, to define the term.  That’s how much we can depend upon slightly less enlightened people to present us with easy answers to such complex problems.  Without going into Plato’s book, as a working concept, we can at least say, what few would disagree with, that justice cannot make sense if we do not have at the same time reward and punishment: we reward those who obey the law and punish those who disobey [break] the law.  How very simple even if not so easy.  All we need now is to determine, as our Constitution enjoins us: a reward or punishment that fits the deed [the patriotic duty or the crime].  We also need honest [patriotic] judges, prosecutors, and legislators.  [Where might we find such creatures, or as we remember how Diogenes went around in daylight with his lamp looking for the honest man?]

     We can well empathize with anyone who is seeking the better life, like the rapist, holdup man, mugger, or white collar crooks who bilk people [associates, clients, friends, the company, and our nation] out of billions of dollars when they create a world financial crisis for their pleasure, that is, “seeking the better life.”  A wetback is not normally seen as either a rapist or white collar crook, fleecing the country of billions of dollars, chiefly because we picture him wading across the Rio Grande mostly in the evening or night alone or sometimes with a couple of family members. We even feel a tender sympathy for them when we hear of their hardships if they get caught, get raped or robbed by the coyote, or die from thirst and hunger trying to drag themselves across the burning deserts of Arizona.  And then we give them cyclical relief with legal amnesties, free medical attention, financial aid, food stamps, and educational benefits.  American humanitarianism and generosity.  No doubt most admirable.  But what does that do for our country when we ignore the basic principles of justice or rule by law?  We reward rather than punish them for a crime tantamount to rape.  That may sound outlandish and perhaps cruel.  That is because we equate rape with sex instead of force.  We take someone or something by force is rape for our benefit/pleasure [seeking the better life] – with or without sex.  It may still seem an exaggeration [for one thing we are hung up on sex, i.e., its avoidance], but let’s go back to the 1930-40s, long before we opened the doors to indiscriminate legal and illegal immigration.  [Americans were doing all the jobs that “no one else wants to do.”]  Now, what if the national alarm went off that 12-13 million Latinos were going to rush over the Rio Grand and invade us?  What would we do?  What would YOU do about it?  Sit back and enjoy being “raped” – as one fine candidate for Texas governor recently said that women should do when confronted by a rapist?  Would you then deign call it rape, or would you start handing out food stamps and lashing out for taxes to pay for the free medical care, education, etc. of 12-13 million illegals who have just swamped over your erstwhile rule-of-law country?

     If we are not entirely brain dead and decide that punishment should fit the crime – breaking our federal laws [if that means anything anymore] – we should consider the crime of illegal immigration as we do rape, or carrying a female across state lines for sex or prostitution.  What do we do in such cases, offer the rapist free education, medical care, food stamps, etc.?  Don’t we slam him in the hoosegow and hand him a hefty prison term?  Why haven’t we done that with the wetbacks?  One of our quickie solutions is to deport them.  Another is to offer them amnesty, as some lame-brained politicians have suggested more than once.  How much would it cost the tax-paying American to ship back 12-13 million illegals?  That’s unadulterated insanity.  Amnesty is tantamount to announcing to the world that it is perfectly correct to break our federal laws – at their pleasure.

     Sanity and reason would demand that all illegals, past, present, and future, be slammed into prison for the same amount of time a rapist would get.  Since he had no legal right to be here, he has no legal status.  Therefore he must pay as he goes in the same way as if he were living in Mexico, China, or Tierra de Fuego: he pays for his personal needs, heat, food, air conditioning, bedding, laundry, medical attention, etc.  To be able to do this, he must work FOR FREE, except for a voucher [no cash or currency of any kind] to credit his work at minimum wage at the moment he was arrested at the rate in that state, never to change until his release.  His work will be the kind of public service work needed in the local community “that no one else will do” until he has finished his term.  He will not be sitting idly in his cell.  AFTER his “debt to society” is paid in terms of time, he must now work to accumulate enough voucher credit to pay for his deportation.  No more free rides back home.

     There has been a misplaced sympathy for the separation of families.  These are not our concern but that of the family involved.  They are the ones willing to take the risks; like any gambler, they must pay the consequences when they lose.  If he is dragged into jail and leaves his family behind because they are “not guilty,” they will not stay here only because they are not guilty.  They, too, have no legal status in this country, because they were not supposed to be here legally in the first place; hence, they will be taken back most economically in a bus to the border and left on the other side.  It is the concern of the affected parties to make preparations before they come to violate our laws as to the care of family if left at the border.

     With such inflexible procedure and expectations on the part of those anticipating an illegal venture across the border, there should be more contemplation by future adventurers before any attempt, because there will be no free ride back home, which they almost invariably take advantage of by making repeated attempts until they succeed – at the American taxpayer’s expense.  Rigorously sweeping them out of sweat shops, restaurants, salons, hotels, etc. will leave prospective lawbreakers scant opportunity for employment and be more than a little discouraging for future illegals, less burden on the American taxpayer, and more employment for Americans in need of work, even those who think today that they would not do that kind of work, because to fill that loop hole, we can save even more tax money by closing all havens and feed bags for the homeless, and then produce plenty of jobs available with 12-13 million less illegals on our premises, and reducing the unemployment rates within our borders.  (There would be havens for invalid homeless.)  [See a fuller discussion on this subject in my Missing in America: Freedom, Justice, and Honor and Boy, What I Could Do With Gates’ Billions!]

     Of course, if we can’t be bothered with doing things right because it’s too much trouble, too cruel, too much to think about, we can always leave things as they are.  Why not?  We love letting things “just happen.”  It’s easier that way, isn’t it?  But, then, would we have a right to complain?

David Hernandez, Ph. D.                                                    Labels: Illegal Immigration

Is there ever going to be a cap to these gas prices?

Is there ever going to be a cap to these gas prices?  How long are we going to remain hostage to Arab oil – and Hugo Chavez?

     How about a cap at $10 a gallon?  Will we be happy if prices stop at $10?  But, why should Exxon and the other Robber Barons stop gouging us there when we’re more than willing to keep lashing out to keep our cars running?  As for Arab oil and Chavez setting us free, that will be the day the wells run dry.  But, why complain when we so love the status quo?
     Of course, we keep hearing various voices from the gallery about electric cars, corn, and other clever means of running our cars without need of fossil-burning fuel.  Good old American ingenuity at work, and all is well.  The world will be saved.  Will the great American invention save us before gas is over $10 a gallon?  Forgive me if I’m just a wee bit skeptical.  After all, it’s just a bit dubious that Exxon and co-conspirators will be deliriously happy losing out on the record billions in profits they keep churning out each year that we cheerfully help them squeeze out of us.
     May I dare suggest the most obvious, rational, indeed, only sane alternative?  How about public transportation?  Oh, yes, I was prepared for your objections.  The first objection is always: it won’t work; it never has.  Such objections invariably insist that it has been tested many times, and it just doesn’t work.  Well, let’s see if what I’m proposing they have tested to the letter of the plan.  You tell me if they have.
     Let’s begin by making some simple, logical, necessary observations.  Some of the objections are: you can never find a bus when you need one; it takes forever to get to where you want to get, principally because there aren’t enough of them, requiring long waits between them and in making connections; they don’t go everywhere one needs to go; for weekly/monthly grocery shopping, there is too much to carry onto a bus and between transfers; the same problems for traveling by air; etc.  These are certainly valid complains as things are today and have been.
     Let’s consider the remedy.  Some simple undeniable facts: the average purchase of a car is roughly every five years; the average new car costs about $20-25K; if we are optimistic and give you at least 35 more years of driving, that amounts to about $175,000 we have paid to have the “freedom” of our car.  How about insurance?  How much does that cost, depending on age, accidents, and coverage?  If it is high now, do we expect it to come down any time soon?  How about betting that it will continue to keep climbing?  There is, of course, maintenance, repairs [something that is likely to become more frequent with the millions of additional new cars on the road [what with the countless legal and illegal immigrants and their numerous children, who will soon also be needing a car, that keep streaming into this country until we are bound to outstrip India and China in population in a few years the way this land of opportunity is going, where they are all going “to find a better life], time lost from work for repairs, hospitalization, and even death [a thing we think can never happen to us in the freedom of our cars]; etc.  That’s a chunk of change we’re pouring out just for the “freedom” of our cars.
     Why haven’t these so-called tests been legitimate, and thoroughly misleading?  The honest answer is that public transportation can never work so long as we have our roads cluttered with the millions of cars we have running on them.  To make a true test for public transportation, we must take ALL private vehicles that burn fossil fuel OFF the roads!  Now, if we can picture NO PRIVATE VEHICLES on our roads and freeways, can we not also imagine how quickly buses and cabs would be able to zip across town as fast and faster than a private car today, especially during rush hours?  That would make a difference, wouldn’t it?  One we have never seen in those so-called tests.  (For fuller discussion see my Missing in America: Freedom, Justice, and Honor and Boy, What I Could Do With Gates’ Billions!)
     Obama has earmarked billions of dollars for the repair and building of new roads.  What if instead of pouring those billions down the drain [since we shall never catch up with ourselves with the booming growth of our population and the need for millions of more cars and trucks each year, especially now that Mexican President Felipe Calderon has won the agreement from Obama to allow Mexican trucks onto our roads] we invested in a first-class public transportation system?  We would not have to keep building and repairing endless roads, and we wouldn’t be slaughtering the millions of people on our roads that we have since the first cars became lethal weapons.  [Food for thought for those people so concerned about the number of fetuses we “murder” in abortions.]  We get a lot of lip service about our concern for our environment, including its warming effects on our icebergs and rising seas, which are gobbling up our shorelines.  Could we make a difference by removing all fossil-burning private vehicles off our streets and expressways?  So, why aren’t we doing it, or do we really prefer just to listen to ourselves talk?
     We see in our major cities buses running virtually empty, and people complain because of high fares and poor service.  With everyone using the buses, the fares could be nominal and plenty of buses and cabs available at all hours and along all thoroughfares and most side streets.  Cabs, at nominal fares, would be the means of connecting buses and shuttle vehicles when necessary and convenient, especially to connect at airports.  Because the demand of oil would be reduced considerably the price of a barrel would plummet, and to run planes, buses, and cabs would also be reduced.  With the billions not wasted on new roads, they could be used to build “bullet” trains, so that not as many planes would be necessary.
     Obviously, if our proposal were taken seriously, we could expect the oil and car manufactures to wage implacable war against it.  Can we imagine seeing their top executives smiling and giggling while their billions of profits fly out the window?  We can also anticipate the loss of jobs, of course.  But did we mourn too much when the Pony Express was supplanted by the Stage Coach, the Stage Coach by the train, the train by the car and plane?  I dare say not very much or for very long.  We now have the Internet, practically making the Post Office and book publication obsolete.  It seems just about time for public transportation, if not to modernize, at least to save our necks – and spare us Hugo Chavez.

David Hernandez, Ph. D.


For More Information Check Out Boy, What I Could Do With Gates' Billions! and Missing In America: Freedom, Justice, and Honor.