Occupy Wall Street, Like the Left, is Perpetually Stuck in 1968
“The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the nation’s children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized. There is more reality expressed about the American experience by the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves. What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?”—
For those who are wondering why there are protests across the the country, these are good reasons why people feel disenfranchised and angry.
Chris Hedges (via azspot)
Nobody denies that there are big and systemic problems in our country today.
But that quote does way too far, and is full of emotionally charged words backed by an anti-American viewpoint espoused by a known anti-American Leftist, Chris Hedges. It’s a big bowl of “we suck”.
And to the extent any of it is even close to true, most of those problems can be blamed squarely on government intervention in places it either doesn’t belong, or doesn’t understand well enough to affect change. The Left continually refuses to accept this essential fact, and stubbornly continues to believe — despite decades of contrary evidence — that government does everything well, and is the right and proper solution for every problem.
Government is more often the cause of our problems than the solution to our problems.
Again, we get that there are problems in our country today, and we get that young people face huge obstacles, we get that $140K of student loans for an Anthropology degree is criminal, we get that Wall Street has some nefarious characters, we get all of that.
But when looking for solutions, you have to identify the major problem first, and the major problem behind most of that rant up there is too much government, screwing up the economy and killing jobs and funneling cash to connected friends of government. That’s how we got here, and that’s what needs addressing to fix it.
