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Faith in government
I couldn't resist making a couple of posts on Yahoo (under the name omac_lives) about an article on the American people's loss of faith in government.
Subject: It's no accident...
Of COURSE people are losing their faith in government. That's what the neocons WANT. If they can eliminate the government, make it so small that they can "drown it in the bathtub", then there'll be nothing to stand between rapacious corporations and the people.
Unfortunately too many people don't know what things were like in the age of the Robber Barons, when big business called the shots.
Child labor - children working 16 or more hours a day in factories, seven days a week, and dying by the hundreds every day.
Debtor's prison - get sick, get behind on your bills, and you found yourself in prison working off your debt, often for life.
The vicious circle - work for a company, and you had to live in the company town, buy a company house, go to the company church, shop at the company store. With prices calculated to keep you always behind, always in debt, and effectively a slave for life.
Senior poverty - No pensions. No Social Security. Old age was synonymous with desperate poverty. And with no social safety net, people went out on the street and died - for most of them, there were no other options.
Safe food and water - you don't even want to KNOW the sort of things that companies put in food, back in the day. Bleach in milk and bread, to make it extra white, just for starters.
But the American people have grown soft, and stupid, and ignorant. They've forgotten what it means to really suffer, thanks to decades of enlightened progressive programs. And now they're on the verge of losing it all.
The neocons, backed by the super-rich, have taken over - and what a surprise, they've screwed up government hopelessly. The wolves have starved and crippled the sheepdog, in the hopes that the angry sheep will send that damned dog away. Because then the wolves could take CARE of the sheep, in that oh-so-perfect free market way...right?
To be honest, I think - I HOPE - that the neocons have misjudged the American people. Or at least that they've misjudged our apathy, our passivity, our willingness to suffer in silence. My gut feeling is that as things get worse and worse, people will continue to get more and more angry. And the time may come when things get really ugly.
Unfortunately most of the rich will probably be able to escape with their loot to Saudi Arabia or some such place, leaving behind a devastated and ruined America. At the least, though, we can hope that the environmental damage will not be so severe that it destroys the human race.
But I wouldn't count on it.
Subject: Re: the bird flu
It's true that TODAY, you're much more likely to die in a car crash than from bird flu. But it would be a mistake to think that there couldn't be a pandemic. Please check out the history. MILLIONS of Americans died in 1918 from the worldwide influenza epidemic.
Not only could it happen again, scientists say that it's *likely*. After all, the world has become a much smaller place since that time, thanks to modern transportation technology. Improvements in medical science have given us some additional tools to use in the fight against flu, but experts insist that a global epidemic causing millions of deaths all around the world is *very* possible. Do you really want to take a chance that they're wrong?
It's not a bedtime story. It's a very real and frightening possibility.
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I'm just living my life and will worry about when it mutates. When it does I'll pray that the experts do their job as quickly as possible. Until then I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.
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Silly tangent on Bird Flu; the Tamiflu drug which is about the only thing that does much of anything for it is made with "Star Anise" which pops up as an ingredient on "Iron Chef" (both versions).