For as long as I can remember I have had a beef with the well to do who are blind to the suffering of others. Even if the milk of human kindness couldn’t over come this blindness self preservation ought to. And yet in rebellions going back before the time of Christ starving people have turned on the well protected time and time again. I think that goes a long way to explaining Donald Trump’s legions.
This view has been with me since my college days. I know life distracts people but a few of us in the well to do column have to always keep this in mind and I have tried to do be one of those people. My first real sense of this from my own life came as I made a hash out of my early teaching career. I was once going to write a book about it called either “Three Strikes Your Out” or “The Worst Teacher in the World.” What I came to realize in those years were the vast number of bright young minds that winked out during their school careers. For the rest of my life imagining a society that kept that light flickering without burning it out in our schools has consumed me. But the putative “white college educated suburbanites” I mentioned are more consumed by giving their own children a leg up than worrying about giving them more competition by lifting up all the other children.
Then in the years my Friday essay mentioned where my liberal and moderate associates were RINO’ed out of the Republican Party I saw them sit back and ignore the ideas, dogmas and politics of the Party that was pulling the rug out from under them and accepting the change. It called to mind that old saw: “First they came for the socialists but I did not speak out…..”
But speaking out or giving the editor of your local paper or the brutal majority of your school board is what I have fated myself to do. In the years as Moral Majoritarians like Pat Robertson urged his flock to go into the Republican party but hide their religious affiliations I couldn’t let that subterfuge go unmentioned.
The GOP has been propped up by white suburban college educated voters. But I must be fair. Today its the children of those suburban voters who are filling the streets over George Floyd. And I think their parents while not being ahead of them are catching up.
420 words to here. When I began this earlier I said I might stop caring. I had a thousand words burning a hole in my brain……I knew I needed to say something but this barely covers what was on my mind. Well, that’s just one more lesson about striking while the iron is hot…..I don’t even feel like editing this. I like my post about my young neighbors though. That made my night.