After the presidential election, a lot of Democrats insisted
that the red-blue divide was really an intelligence gap: that no well-educated
person could have voted for Bush.
Balderdash;
plenty of smart people voted for him. Plenty of smart people support the war in
Iraq. Plenty of
smart people agree with Bush on tort reform.
But now
comes a test. What on earth do Bush supporters think about their man as he
starts work on Social Security?
Are they
reading the news? Are they paying attention?
Bush’s lies
to the contrary, Social Security is not in
crisis. It continues to have a surplus every year. That’ll go away in, oh, 47
years or so, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Small, eminently
reasonable changes — increasing the contributions from wealthy taxpayers, for
instance, or upping the retirement age slightly —would wipe out that
deadline.
And you
know, of course, that we’ve been stealing money from the Social Security fund
— taking the surplus and spending it on other things.
This stuff
is not hard to understand. Neither is the importance of Social Security. Before
Social Security was enacted in 1935, elderly people made up a huge proportion
of the nation’s poor. Many of them were forced to live in abysmal “poorhouses.”
These
weren’t unwed teenage mothers. They were parents, grandparents, aunts and
uncles — elderly people who weren’t working and thus had no paycheck. And no
retirement income.
Our
president, a wealthy man who will have no such worries, wants to take away the
guarantee of Social Security and replace it with gambling, in the form of
private investments. This is consistent with Bush’s every-man-for-himself
philosophy. It is not consistent with the philosophy of a country that cares
about its elderly.
The
president has begun his privatization push. It’s time now to push back. You can
start by writing Greater Rochester’s members of Congress: in the House,
Republicans Thomas Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, and James Walsh and Democrat Louise
Slaughter; in the Senate, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.
Mourning
The first few words we heard about the tsunamis came in an
NPR report, playing in the background as we sat talking with a daughter home
for a warm, happy Christmas holiday. Earthquake…
tidal waves… perhaps thousands dead.
Far away, in places far too
familiar with tragedy. And the news receded from our consciousness.
But we could
not ignore the news for long. Countries all around the Indian Ocean
were hit: In Kenya, 3200 miles from the earthquake’s origin, one life lost. Bangladesh,
two. Seychelles,
three. Tanzania,
10. Malaysia,
65; Myanmar,
65; Maldives,
69. Somalia,
200. Thailand,
4800. India,
9000. Sri Lanka,
28,700.
Indonesia,
94,000.
The numbers
don’t include the missing. Or the thousands and thousands more who may die in
the dreadful, desperate aftermath of the tsunamis.
The photos
keep coming. A father sobbing as he grasps the hand of his 8-year-old son. A
mother screaming in anguish as she bends over her child. Dazed women watching
as bodies are placed in a mass grave. Pictures of victims posted on the wall of
a town hall to help families identify victims. Rows of bodies of children laid
out on a concrete floor.
And then,
desperately poor people, having lost what little they had, began enduring days
without food and water.
By Monday
of this week, donations were pouring into the area — but many of the
hardest-hit places were nearly impossible to reach. Children began to become
ill. Rescue workers warned of starvation.
In some
cultures, grief is expressed with loud public weeping and moaning. Perhaps it
is more like an anguished howl of pain.
What else to
do, in the face of all this monstrous, unanticipated, inexplicable tragedy?
There is no one to blame. No terrorist, no superpower, no global warming.
We should
give to the relief efforts, of course. And quickly. And shout to the skies:
Send planes and ships — send helicopters — quickly. Get food and water to
the living victims. Quickly.
And then
stand and weep. Weep aloud.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.
