Scott Walker won re-election in Wisconsin. Normally, I'd just keep my yap shut regarding all things political on this blog but really - Scott Walker, the most reviled Republican since GW Bush won re-election in Wisconsin. Who's to blame?
The people of Wisconsin are clearly under either a mind control drug or are collectively some of the most gullible human beings on the face of the planet. I'm hoping for the former but am fairly certain it is probably the latter. Now I know what you may be thinking -"MO how can you be such a callous person?" Let us look at some very basic basic facts about Scott Walker and you tell me, could any reasonable person vote for that individual to lead their state into this new century and decade?
Scott Walker: 1) Removed the collective bargaining rights and detsroyed the pensions of thousands of State of Wisconsin employees and teachers thereby weakening the unions and strengthening more powerful, wealthier organizations, like corporations. 2) Raised $31 million dollars from predominantly out of state billionaires, corporations and PACs and this was not a secret revealed to the Wisconsin voters AFTER his win but they knew this all along, 3) Frequently utilizes fear, prejudices, hatred and religion as motivation for his agenda. He just announced the day after his re-election that he planned on denying same-sex couples hospital visitation rights
Would you vote for this man? Because to me, he sounds like the edge of a slippery slope that Germany once was atop seventy years ago before plunging into a very dark chasm. Once the minority and the marginalized lose their protections and those rights that place them on equal footing with others, our democracy is not a democracy but something more sinister. Facism plays on both people's fears and their own egos and in Wisconsin's case, using women, gay men and public employees as scapegoats for societal problems that they have nothing to do with, we creep ever more closely to a Facist state and lose all sense of why exactly our forefathers brought forth on this continent "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
We forget that the Boston Tea Party was not about taxes as the Tea Party would have you believe, but about the loss of the right of those governed to represent themselves and decide, on their own, whether or not they would be taxed. Those original patriots were protesting the loss of their voice in a Parliament thousands of miles and a many week's journey from the land that their King and that Parliament purpotedly sought to represent and tax without the consent of those governed.
I am toying with the idea of creating a new blog and a new organization to counter the Tea Party movement. An organization dedicated to remembering the ideals that caused men and women over two hundred years ago to throw tea into Boston Harbor and tar and feather Stamp Act Tax collectors. Those ideals are the same Thomas Jefferson spoke of in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Let those simple truths be the reminder that a government, in fact, our government must strive to allow us the ability to live freely and be happy. That any law or measure that restricts these basic truths should be looked at with trepidation. The Pursuit of Happiness are not mere words but why we exist as an independent nation to begin with. Let that be upon the conscience of every law maker, every law enforcer, every law interpreter and most importantly on every eligible voter.
