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!!!
A professional acquaintance of mine, a fellow with over 30 years of Texas politicking under his belt, just posted this in a public status on Facebook, quoting from this post at Esquire.com:
Um, holy shit, y'all. He uses that FB account for work stuff. He is known as a deal-maker and a pragmatist. And even he is so frustrated that he will post this - which, you know, happens to be pretty much totally accurate - right out there in front of God and everybody. Wowsers.
In a weird way, this makes me feel good. I feel less alone. I am sick to fucking death of people being all, oh, you shouldn't say rude or angry stuff about the other party, your friends and neighbors and family could be in it. I mean, yes, I wish everyone everywhere, particularly middle class white people in the US, would stop saying shit like, "People who vote for <x> should be taken out and shot," because hey, assholes, that bullshit is gigantically fucking disrespectful to the millions of people who died in exactly that fashion, and unless you are a person of color in the US, that has literally never existed as a possibility in your world. Shut the entire fuck up.
But really, folks? If it is more important to you to avoid paying taxes than it is for queer people, women, poor people, old people, people of color, transfolk, and all the intersections thereof to be treated as full human beings? I get to be fucking angry at you, because that is my life and the lives of people I love that you are throwing under the bus. If that is your position, you are not my fucking friend, because you are straight up saying that my life is worth less than your wallet. I get to be angry about that.
And I will not apologize for that. Not for a goddamn second. And if you want to argue with me about that, think first about the part where I am less than a year away from two master's degrees in understanding many, many details of how all that works. Also, be aware that explaining in a patronizing way about how no, you care about economic growth is going to make me want to slap the face right off your damn head. I understand this extremely thoroughly. That is a crucial part of why I am so angry. I'm staying with an engineer friend right now who was asking me about health care reform, and he was curious about why everything is so fucked up, why can't we fix it? And I said, honey, we CAN. We totally could. We know how to do it. We have goddamn reams of data from all over the world because we are the only wealthy industrialized democracy on the planet that does not have some kind of national health care thingy, whether that's single-payer in the UK or a mandate and heavy public regulation in Switzerland. The US is the late adopter here, and we can learn from their mistakes. We know how to do it. These unutterably selfish assholes just refuse to listen to the facts and the options and make the hard choice. The more I understand about policy, the angrier I get. We know how. So let's make it happen. If you don't want that, um, seriously? Like the guy at Esquire said, you are pretty much saying that you are okay with poor people dying in the streets. And I wish you would seek some therapy or fucking go live somewhere else where you do not get to vote on what happens to the lives of people who aren't as lucky as you.
See, here's the deal. We have two parties in this country right now. One party is a center-right party that believes that it is unseemly to let old people die in the streets. And the other party is insane. In any "conversation," the first people in the first party say, "Well, okay, then we'll cut here and here and you, maybe, ask some people to pay a little more." And then, the other party says: "Roogie-roogie! Gabba-gabba-hey!" and throws its Maypo against the wall. That is the "conversation" in our politics today.
....Um, holy shit, y'all. He uses that FB account for work stuff. He is known as a deal-maker and a pragmatist. And even he is so frustrated that he will post this - which, you know, happens to be pretty much totally accurate - right out there in front of God and everybody. Wowsers.
In a weird way, this makes me feel good. I feel less alone. I am sick to fucking death of people being all, oh, you shouldn't say rude or angry stuff about the other party, your friends and neighbors and family could be in it. I mean, yes, I wish everyone everywhere, particularly middle class white people in the US, would stop saying shit like, "People who vote for <x> should be taken out and shot," because hey, assholes, that bullshit is gigantically fucking disrespectful to the millions of people who died in exactly that fashion, and unless you are a person of color in the US, that has literally never existed as a possibility in your world. Shut the entire fuck up.
But really, folks? If it is more important to you to avoid paying taxes than it is for queer people, women, poor people, old people, people of color, transfolk, and all the intersections thereof to be treated as full human beings? I get to be fucking angry at you, because that is my life and the lives of people I love that you are throwing under the bus. If that is your position, you are not my fucking friend, because you are straight up saying that my life is worth less than your wallet. I get to be angry about that.
And I will not apologize for that. Not for a goddamn second. And if you want to argue with me about that, think first about the part where I am less than a year away from two master's degrees in understanding many, many details of how all that works. Also, be aware that explaining in a patronizing way about how no, you care about economic growth is going to make me want to slap the face right off your damn head. I understand this extremely thoroughly. That is a crucial part of why I am so angry. I'm staying with an engineer friend right now who was asking me about health care reform, and he was curious about why everything is so fucked up, why can't we fix it? And I said, honey, we CAN. We totally could. We know how to do it. We have goddamn reams of data from all over the world because we are the only wealthy industrialized democracy on the planet that does not have some kind of national health care thingy, whether that's single-payer in the UK or a mandate and heavy public regulation in Switzerland. The US is the late adopter here, and we can learn from their mistakes. We know how to do it. These unutterably selfish assholes just refuse to listen to the facts and the options and make the hard choice. The more I understand about policy, the angrier I get. We know how. So let's make it happen. If you don't want that, um, seriously? Like the guy at Esquire said, you are pretty much saying that you are okay with poor people dying in the streets. And I wish you would seek some therapy or fucking go live somewhere else where you do not get to vote on what happens to the lives of people who aren't as lucky as you.