THE police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration.
You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse.
Not a parody! Honest to God, even the great David Kahane couldn’t make this stuff up. In the case, the author is one Mark Bittman, who gets his inner Occupy freak on with an ill-considered, bitter cri de coeur against, well against just about everything that’s cheesing him off about Amerikkka. It’s also a handy guide to every left-liberal cause du jour, a primal scream of hate against the society that continues to frustrate the Left with its stubborn moral rejection of their Marxist principles:
The progress of the last 40 years has been mostly cultural, culminating, the last couple of years, in the broad legalization of same-sex marriage. But by many other measures, especially economic, things have gotten worse, thanks to the establishment of neo-liberal principles — anti-unionism, deregulation, market fundamentalism and intensified, unconscionable greed — that began with Richard Nixon and picked up steam under Ronald Reagan. Too many are suffering now because too few were fighting then.
There follows a laundry list of moonbat fixations, which I will mercifully skip over in the interests of our collective sanity. Here’s the big peroration:
Everything affects everything. It’s all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse.
Increasingly, it seems, there’s an appetite and even unity to take on the billionaire class. Let’s recognize that if we are seeing positive change now, it’s in part because elected officials respond to pressure, and let’s remember that that pressure must be maintained no matter who is in office. Even if Bernie Sanders were to become president, the need for pressure would continue.
“True citizenship,” says Jayaraman of Berkeley — echoing Jefferson — “is people continually protesting.” Precisely.
As that great former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote in her Wellesley thesis on Saul Alinsky: “There is only the fight.” I say, if they want a fight, let’s give it to them. To bad the GOP squishes in Congress aren’t on our side.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member