What to use this blog for? I already have a WordPress blog that I use for music topics. Or used to before I got so involved with my girlfriend who became my fiancee and will soon be my wife (I will again once I get settled in, promise).
I suppose I can use it to rant about random topics that might annoy my conservative friends and family members who haven’t yet unfriended me on Facebook.
I recently read part of a speech about the state of American society that really struck a nerve. David Simon, creator of the TV show The Wire refers to our society as a “horror show,” where capitalism has won a nearly total victory and there is no real social compact.
He is so right. We will let you die in the gutter and say you deserved it in this country. Social Darwinism tells us those people just weren’t good enough, didn’t try hard enough. Why if they’d just pulled themselves up by the bootstraps that successful people won’t admit they inherited, they’d be productive citizens, millionaires even.
Prosperity Gospel preached in our churches tells us if you worship hard enough and have enough faith, God will reward you. You’ll have enough, won’t get too sick to work, won’t lose your job when the company outsources your department to another country, won’t lose your home when the banks gamble with everyone’s money and jack up the economy. Born poor? Got laid off and wound up on the street? God’s obviously punishing you for some reason.
It’s almost like a dream sometimes, hearing myself talk, when I used to be first a Christian fundamentalist and later an idealistic libertarian, but the fact is, none of those ways of thinking turned out to be true and I’d rather change my mind and admit I was wrong than live in denial.
I’m not sure there’s any way to fix this now that the capitalist machine has purchased the American electoral process. Maybe will come to, as Simon put it, “the brick.” I almost felt like revolution was upon us during the Occupy protests, but face it: if we have a revolution in America, it’s those crazy Tea Party types who have all the guns. Not that I was fond of the black bloc anarchists who mucked up the OWS protests.
I guess for now it’s wait and see. Maybe democracy or some wealthy person like FDR with a heart for the poor will come up with something. In the meantime, Sing While You May. I have a job and a woman and live in Austin, which ain’t a bad place to be.
