We are sick and tired of being (spiritually) sick

 Coming off of five years of Trump vitriol in our national politics (epitomized by Twitter name-calling and straight-faced lies for purely political purposes), which quickly leaked into and poisoned many everyday interactions, I have been feeling cautiously optimistic.  Joe Biden is not perfect -- I didn't vote for him in the primary, and would still rather see someone closer to my mindset in office -- but he is a decent human being with decent human impulses, unlike the immediate past president.  He's experienced enough to know what to look out for in foreign relations, he's able and willing to operate under the rule of law, and he accepts the premises of a democratic republic.  

It used to be that these underlying paradigms were common enough that they would not be remarked upon.  That is no longer the case, but it is to be devoutly hoped for in the future. Now that we know that a whole bunch of people (cough cough Trump Republicans cough) don't have foresight, think the rule of law is for fools, and don't actually want a democratic anything, let alone a republic -- now that we know that, we need to explicitly and dare I say stridently advocate for those principals.  Every day.  Every damn time someone acts like the New Normal is acceptable and expected.

Voting for and loudly proclaiming pernicious lies is in fashion, and it's contagious.  There's always the people who want to fight fire with fire.  An eye for an eye! (Do we really all want to be blind?) A tooth for a tooth! (If I can't eat, no one eats!) To the end of their race! (Sorry, I've been teaching A Tale of Two Cities, and Madame Defarge is heavily on my mind right now)

It's contagious and sick.  We are coming off of a pandemic, but we carry the real pandemic inside. Martin Luther King Jr had the right idea when he pointed out that "darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." 

We are still fighting the innate racism of America, but now it's spread from fear and hatred of humans whose skin is a different hue to a twisted tribalism that also hates humans who wear or don't wear masks.  There is no united states, there is only Us and Them.  If you are not with Us, you are against Us. But my friends! Without intending to sound like a bad hippie trope from the early 70s, all we need is love.

Love can drive out hate.  Love can light the darkness.  Love will help us all feel human again.  I don't currently love the people who wholeheartedly bought into the Big Lie and all of its accoutrements.  I will work on that. We should work on that.  But first, we need to acknowledge what we are facing and identify it out loud.  We need to explicitly state the solution (which is love) and then identify when we explicitly use that solution.  And keep on identifying and deploying this love vaccine until the spiritual pandemic subsides.

It can be done.  It hasn't been done before, because it will take a collective and focused will that has to be sustained.  But the alternative is death of all we love (spiritual and figurative as well as physical).

Jesse sent me a link to a NYTimes article the other day, about a proposal in Switzerland to give everyone a basic living stipend.  The idea was it would wipe out poverty.  The stipend wouldn't be enough that anyone was tempted to live on just that, but enough that someone in a low-wage job could be able to feed and house themselves.  At least, that was my interpretation.

In America, the idea is we'd eliminate all subsidy programs and have the same, blanket amount for everyone.  No welfare, medicaid, housing subsidies, or any of the various programs to help people in a tight spot.  Because hopefully, there would be no true tight spots, if everyone had a subsistence level income.

It's socialism, but that's not necessarily bad.  It sounds interesting to me.  I believe it would be cheaper to administer, although the stipend department would need to be huge to take care of and track it all.  Would it apply to everyone?  Would we have an income-cutoff point?  Could someone donate their stipend to someone else?  Would it actually save money?

Food for thought.

Well I said it'd be a soft opening

I intended to get this written and posted by noon today.  Okay, technically, I intended to get this written and posted by noon last Saturday, but who's nitpicking?

I have what I'm going to call my "baseline rant" for the legislature this year.  The Idaho Legislature, in case you're thinking about some other rant-worthy governing body.  This is it:

For the past two years, in a desperate attempt to be more-conservative-than-you, the legislature has intentionally under-estimated the state budget.  They have used the very real recession to maximum political effect and cut every department and program that the state offers its citizens.  Last year was the most heinous, as they ignored the state economist (who is paid by them and at that time had 20 years of experience doing it) and his projections and created a state budget based on numbers they apparently pulled out of their hat (because this is a family-friendly blog, I didn't use the noun that occurred to me first).  That number required cuts to Medicaid, higher education, and for the first time ever a cut to K-12 education.  It was devastating to each of those areas.  AND IT WAS UNNECESSARY, as shown by the magically-appearing budget surplus this year.  It's not a surplus, people.  It's the money that the state economist said would be there in the first place.  And thousands of Idahoans were forced to suffer, losing jobs and wages, medical care and hope, because our legislature thought it knew more about the economy than the state economist.

It makes me so angry.

I'm glad that many of the people currently in office have decided to retire.  I wish more of them would (especially those whose names rhyme with Florence Penny).  That gladness is tempered by the certain knowledge that the people elected to replace the current master-economists will probably not have a better grip on reality.  Based on the direction of politics in this country, and the conservative nature of most of Idaho, the "new blood" in the legislature will probably be a transfusion from the same conservative body as before.

Which means that this time next year, I'll probably still be angry.

What's it all about?

I spent a few years as a member of the Idaho Falls Post Register Local Columnist board.  Every six weeks, I got to write a column that appeared on the Opinions page.  I was always free to choose a topic, and very little editing was involved (meaning, there wasn't much interaction between me and the page editor, other than a reminder that a column was due and a brief message from me when I sent it in).  Eventually, they decided that they needed new blood, so I was discontinued.

But I miss being able to have a forum and a reason to comment!  So I have started this blog.  I intend to publish a weekly commentary by Saturday at noon.  I don't have a specific area that I will focus on, but this blog is likely to focus on public policy, education, federal & state legislation, and the like.

I hope that there will be something here to spark thought and further discussion.