Are you Angry or Frustrated?
Do you feel angry? Fearful? Do you feel antipathy toward someone? Stop for a minute and think about this.
If you’re here, you’re likely feeling some degree of frustration or dissatisfaction with our government or living conditions. Frustration and dissatisfaction spur motivation for change. We want to make something better.
Fear and anger are tools used by someone else to manipulate masses of people for that individual’s benefit.
If what you’re feeling is anger, fear, or some variety of hatred or antipathy toward an individual or a group, then you have opened yourself to being manipulated by someone else for their gain – and it’s possible that you already are being used as a pawn by someone to their advantage rather than yours.
Stirring up people’s latent fears, stoking their anger by twisting the truth or telling outright lies, playing on their emotions while encouraging them to commit federal crimes, and then letting them hang out to dry with the consequences on their own – that doesn’t improve the lives of those so used. It’s the basis on which the person who stokes the anger of their followers by pitting them against someone else may subsequently collect millions of dollars in campaign donations from the wealthy, and fraudulently use some of those millions of dollars for their personal expenses and benefit.
The Incentive to Incite
The media and “opinion” broadcasters who spread misinformation and stoke chaos and divisiveness boost viewership, ratings, their income, and opportunities for yet greater income from books, speaking engagements, and future employment. They have a self-interested incentive to incite.
Politicians who support the lies, chaos, and divisiveness benefit from increased media exposure, greater social media engagement, free self-promotion, and votes from those in whom they instill fear of some real or imagined “other”.
For the general citizenry, does this put food on the table, make people’s mortgage payments, give them cheaper or better healthcare, or a better education? No. Absolutely not. What it does, is it keeps them from uniting into a group sufficiently large and with a loud enough voice to demand higher incomes, better pay, safer working conditions, job stability, affordable housing, safer neighborhoods, affordable high-quality healthcare, and affordable high-quality education.
Whether you’re swayed by an individual or a group, it comes back to a human pulling the strings in their own puppet show, to meet their own purpose.
What’s my gig?
My purpose is two-fold:
(1) Restore the prosperous middle class that made the United States both strong and united during the few decades after the second world war.
(2) Encourage citizens of the United States to put aside their feelings about our differences in order to build a united front and bring about prosperity for us all.
I’m not a politician, am not running for any political office, and have no political aspirations. I’m not asking for money or trying to bilk anyone out of theirs. I simply want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a comfortable life. I want to see the American Dream restored for them.
Currently, kids starting out as young adults in minimum- or low-wage jobs can’t afford housing to live on their own, much less be completely self-supporting. That’s a problem. Based on current median salary and living-expense figures, it would take double your salary today, in 2022, to cover today’s living expenses, and still be as financially well-off as you’d have been with median salaries and expenses fifty years ago, in 1972.
Another serious problem is that over the past three to four decades, job stability has become a thing of the past. How can a person handle a 30-year mortgage on a home if they’re not likely to hold a job for even 3 years, much less 30? There was a time when companies looked askance at a resume’ showing that a job applicant changed jobs in 3 years or less – they didn’t want to hire a “job-hopper”. Companies used to value the knowledge that employees brought to their jobs, as well as the experience that they gained there and used to do their jobs better, more effectively, and more efficiently. Now, corporate focus is on exorbitant executive salaries, slashing expenses, and raising the value of corporate stocks – often at the expense of employee jobs, salaries, and benefits. The problem is that this switch erodes the foundations of society.
Strong labor unions once ensured employment, a living wage, job benefits, and safe working conditions. Labor unions’ effectiveness has since been gutted by state and federal legislation favoring corporate rather than worker interests. The working class has been left choking in the dust of corporations’ race to higher profits. (Are those profits true benefits over the long term, or manipulated to look good in an annual report? At one time, I was a contract employee at MCI, where contractors survived the annual holiday-season employee terminations that were made to give the impression of an improved bottom line at the end of the year, with most of those employees re-hired in January so work could actually carry on. Where is MCI today?)
Home, Health, Education
Most people would be fairly content if they had a job providing sufficient income to cover their living expenses, which includes paying a mortgage on a home in a safe neighborhood with good schools for educating their children.
If you want job stability, a living wage, and an affordable home, then let’s work together and make that happen.
Ditch the Anger
Forget political affiliation. Forget about religion, skin tone, gender identity, or anything else that can be used to divide us. Yes, the United States is less “white” than it was in the mid-twentieth century — that’s old news. The horses have left the stable and there’s no point in shutting that barn door. The old horses needed some exercise, fresh grass, and new blood anyway, all of which can make them stronger. Someone else’s skin tone or cultural heritage is not what’s keeping you or your children from having a good job and affordable housing.
What’s the Real Problem?
In a word: greed. Greed for power and money. The will of a few who trample the many in pursuit of power and money. The fact that some members of Congress care more about lining their pockets, getting re-elected, raising their political profile, or increasing their social media engagement than actually performing activities to benefit the constituents who elected them.
The Enablers:
- The Problem: Focus on elections rather than the jobs they’re elected to do. Politicians who work to stay in office rather than to benefit their voters aren’t doing their jobs. The Solution: Term limits. Limit the incentive that politicians have to pander to those having the means to get them re-elected. Limit congress to one or two terms in office. That is, for life: no, a representative or senator can’t be term-limited in one house and then run for office in the other, nor can they move to another state to run again after being term-limited.
- The Problem: The Electoral College. The Electoral College keeps putting people into office who lost the popular vote, sometimes by millions. The Electoral College was a solution for a time when communication was a slow, manual process. With current abilities for real-time communications, the Electoral College is outmoded. It encourages gerrymandering to favor district lines for whatever political party controls a state’s legislature. Laws for specific rules to be followed regarding voting by electoral representatives or options for upsetting or overruling them are unclear and now subject to interpretation and debate. The Solution: Eliminate a host of election problems by eliminating the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote.
- The Problem: Campaign donations. When 1% of the wealthiest corporations and individuals support the election campaigns of the politicians in office, those politicians are beholden to those 1% of the wealthiest corporations and individuals, providing a huge incentive to pass legislation favoring those 1% who put them into office. The Solution: Stop public funding of political campaigns. Use limited and equal amounts of tax dollars to inform the public of the bases of individuals’ candidacy and policies they support. Eliminating the practice of simply criticizing an opponent while not standing for substantial policies to benefit voters would be a bonus.
- The Problem: Partisanship that prevents action to benefit US citizens. The Solution: Focus on solutions, not party. Put politics aside; take action to benefit the voters.
- The Problem: Filibuster. Stonewalling benefits no one. The Solution: Ban the filibuster. Discuss. Negotiate. Vote. Take action.
- The Problem: Rigid party platforms. Political candidates often need to toe the line drawn by the party with which they are affiliated. Deviation from the party platform may result in loss of the party’s support. Views have become black or white, a coin-flip that disallows negotiation. The current political party situation has become not only unresponsive to our citizens, but also corrosive to our democracy. The Solution: Broader views and broader opportunity. Support for additional parties and unaffiliated candidates.
- The Problem: News media that isn’t news. Once upon a time in the US, news programs reported facts. There were three networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Whether your news station was ABC, NBC, or CBS, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and others all reported the same news without emotion or embellishment. There was no “opinion” in a news broadcast. If a journalist made up something and reported it as fact, they were fired. Today, it’s not obvious to the viewer which news is actually factual, and which so-called news is someone’s spin, spun is such a way as to kick up viewer emotions to fever-pitch with the sole purpose of increasing ratings or currying political favor. This is a very dangerous trend that is extremely erosive of trust, unity, and democracy. The Solution: (1) Report only factual news, as was done in the past, or (2) Clearly label opinion broadcasting as such. For example, in a newspaper, it is generally held that an editorial is someone’s opinion; a recurring “column” may be the author’s viewpoint; an article is held to reflect actual facts. It was common knowledge that supermarket tabloids were BS intended to entertain rather than accurately inform. Whether broadcast, online, or in print, it should be made obvious which articles are actual fact and which are opinions, spin, or outright lies. Opinion broadcasts should come with warning labels such as those on cigarette cartons that exposure can be dangerous to the viewers’ mental health, physical wellbeing, and view of reality.
Beware of politician put-downs
Have you noticed that much of politics has become criticism of other politicians rather than promoting policies that will benefit US citizens? Rather than congress men and women working together to the benefit of those who elected them, hyper-partisanship has put the brakes on actions to benefit the general populace. If the time and energy spent on slamming a political opponent or the other party were spent working to benefit constituents, then imagine what could be accomplished!
The representative or senator who makes you angry and turns you against the other political party is distracting you from the fact that that representative or senator is not passing legislation or otherwise working to actually make your life better.
Don’t fall for it. Hold your legislators responsible for improving wages, infrastructure, policies that benefit our citizens. Make them responsible for taking positive action, make them responsive to your needs, and hold them accountable.
Be informed about who actually does what in congress, and vote accordingly. It’s not about party. It’s about action to improve the lives of the many.