Shareholders only, please

Note: There are truly stupid people of all stripes in this country. This essay calls out certain classes of them. If you are not one of them, then I am not talking about you. If you feel singled out, then maybe you should call somebody.

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I haven’t written in nearly four months because I got a job, then I got another one, and that getting up early and going to an office and coming home late thing is simply not conducive to creativity. At least the time it leaves isn’t. That’s not a complaint, it’s a logistics observation. It’s hard to follow your bliss when you’re working all the time, and it’s impossible to follow your bliss when you’re looking for a job (and are probably depressed).

So who gets to follow their bliss? People who don’t need much to live on, who are independently wealthy or supported or retired. I guess if the rest of us want to follow our bliss, we should be working toward a lifestyle that doesn’t take as much to support so we won’t have to work as hard to make as much money which should leave us more time off to follow our bliss?

Do I sound like that cocaine commercial from the ’80s?

People who can follow their bliss because they have alternate means of support are very lucky. I woke up this morning hoping they know that. My mother always said that she thought everybody should live in New York City for at least a year before they settle down. I think everybody should be flat broke with no safety net (mom & dad) in New York City for at least a year before settling down. Hell, before being allowed to vote.

(How’d you like that segue?)

I have had a lot and lost a lot and earned a lot and lost a lot again. It made me brave and I took chances because I felt like I could always do with less and that it was never too late to start over. It made me more compassionate because I knew what it felt like to have bill collectors calling or the power cut off or to be sick with no way to pay a doctor. I haven’t had a personal safety net since my mother died when I was 25. The last time I lost everything — to a hurricane and the mortgage scandal — I was 50. Since then, three years, some Truly Mean Republican Legislators, who I feel sure have never been flat broke without a safety net, have made it their mission to “privatize” the retirement safety net that I have been paying into for thirty years — phasing benefits out completely starting with people my age.

Suddenly I’m not feeling so brave.

So I trade my bliss for a really good job that I truly enjoy, but which would not be what I would be doing with my life if I were independently wealthy — which is my litmus test for why I do anything I do. This time I rebuild with a solid twelve-year plan so I don’t have to retire in poverty. I trade my bliss — my art — for that security because I live in a paper culture that doesn’t value it. Art, that is. Stupendous technology notwithstanding, we are not a very evolved lot.

Nonetheless, I know that I am lucky to have the choice to work, thanks to a marketable skillset and professional connections. Not everyone does. And that’s because right now the rules are all being rewritten by those Truly Mean Republican Legislators (TMRLs).

Thanks to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that says corporations and labor unions have the same First Amendment freedom of speech rights as individuals to spend unlimited money to support or oppose candidates for election, the TMRLs are now entirely owned by corporations, PACs, lobbying groups — O&G, tobacco, NRA, insurance, Wall Street, Christian zealots — and the first order of spending is to fast and furiously abolish the only liberal class to benefit from the decision, labor unions.

How are they getting away with it?

When we were children, we sang along to songs whose lyrics we learned phonetically. We didn’t have any idea what the words meant. It wasn’t until we were grown and heard the song again on the radio — OMG I love this song, turn it up, turn it up!!! — did we actually hear the words.

I remember driving to church choir practice with a carload of sixth grade boys and girls all enthusiastically singing this popular Grammy winner. The harmonies at the end were angelic:

Knowing that people hear only what they want to hear, the TMRLs have amped up the thing they are diabolically best at: completely indiscreet Machiavellian language manipulation. They expropriate certain otherwise benign words and concepts and transfigure them into nonsense. Then they say them over and over again in an embarrassingly redundant but effective show of solidarity. (“See? We all speak the same language; therefore, what we say is true.”) In front of TVs and computers and iPads around the world, you see conservatives fist bumping and liberals running for the dictionary. (Did you know that it’s not racist to call President Obama the “Welfare President”? Just ask Newt Gingrich.)

Along the way, TMRLs have enlisted a cadre of Truly Stupid Conservatives (Christian zealots, gun freaks, self-anointed Patriots, get-your-nanny-mitts-off-my-smokes libertarians, and wish-I-were-rich-enough-to-invest-in-Enron-with-Bernie-Madoff wannabes). By stupid, I mean not living up to their intellectual potential, letting other people think for them, acting in ways that are greedy and counter-intuitive to their own best interests. I do not mean lacking mental capacity. That would be mean.

Of course Mean and Stupid go together like the Iowa State Fair and fried butter — Mean loves Stupid because Stupid believes whatever Mean tells him — like socialism is bad because it means “death panels for taking care of people who can’t afford health care on their own,” and flat taxes and corporate tax cuts are good because “corporations are rich people and rich people are the job creators,” and marriage equality is bad because it threatens “normal people marriage — like you and me, wink-wink.”

My stepfather, coincidentally a Mean Republican, used to yell at the top of his voice at my little brother, “We’re all together on this family outing and we’re doing this fun thing so we’re going to be happy and this is going to be FUN, goddammit!” and what d’ya know? My little brother would bawl his brains out.

Words don’t matter when the tone belies them. Mean knows this, and he uses a “you can trust me cause I’m your rich uncle” tone of voice that makes Stupid believe him, even though the tone doesn’t match the (expropriated) words. Stupids wants to believe him because Stupid wants to be him when he grows up.

Democrats, Liberals, Left-wingers, pick a title — quick, before they abscond with it — we share a life philosophy based on interdependence. We all believe to differing degrees that as human beings we are all born equally deserving and responsible for one another. While there are certainly mean and stupid people among us, this group is not defined by being institutionally mean or stupid. By and large, it doesn’t promote redistribution of wealth either, to be clear… just fairness of opportunity.

Occupy X, disjointed as it is at the moment, is typical of the Left’s big, inclusive and sometimes discordant tent. I believe the movement was triggered by some people who started hearing the words behind the tone of voice. Somewhere around the time of that absurd debt ceiling debate when the TMCLs were trying to horsetrade — no, hostage negotiate — FEMA aid to tornado victims and Planned Parenthood cancer screenings to women and Medicare to the entire Baby Boom generation in exchange for tax cuts for corporations and for themselves — somewhere in that time, people started hearing the words that “corporations are people” now and they are a protected class that we bailed out with our tax dollars and they’re not repaying us, and that everything in this culture that is good and decent and compassionate and fair is under attack and in legitimate danger of being abolished, or at least undercut to the point of being ineffectual.

We are about to become a Shareholders Only country. The rest of us are on our own.

When they figured that out, that’s when they took their disorganized shell-shocked selves to the streets. Because corporations don’t die, my friend, and they don’t need health insurance. And they sure as heck have never been flat broke without a safety net. That’s why a whole mess o’ folks around the world are sitting in for reasons they themselves can hardly articulate. They’ve just started hearing the words.

Mean will always be mean, but there’s hope for Stupid. We just need to pull his fingers out of his ears. I’m sure this is one of his favorites.

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one