An erstwhile Twitter and Substack colleague created a sign for writers to place on their doors that immediately resonated with me. Here it is attached to the shelf section of my desk. (The snow leopard canvas and the tulips on the computer screen are bearlydesigned.com originals.)
I am disturbed. I have three mental health conditions that, despite treatment, poke out now and then, particularly when I read comments to essays and news articles. My overall sense of contentment and serenity gets roiled when I come across people spouting opinions that have no basis in fact who expect said opinions to be treated with the same dignity as reasoned conclusions derived from verifiable evidence and acknowledged principles.
What happened between the time I finished college in 1981 and the onset of this devotion to everyone’s opinion deserves equal treatment? One factor clearly was the Reagan Revolution. The man lied when he labeled government programs the creator of problems rather than the solution.
Reagan convinced a majority of voters that the federal government was so dysfunctional it was necessary to scale back or end the promises of the New Deal and the Great Society. Never mind that the evidence proved the methods used to improve the general welfare of the population worked. Instead, anecdotal memes of “welfare queens” and such were summoned to undermine confidence in the social safety net.
The tragedy is that those tactics worked. That spurred the GOPers to attack taxes as a burden, not a means to fuel the economy and improve lives by putting money and opportunities in front of working- and middle-class folks. Those people drive our consumer-based economy.
Instead, the GOPers insisted, without evidence, that wealthy individuals and corporations need lower taxes in order to invest in the economy and create jobs. About the only thing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the 2017 tax cuts did was line the pockets of the wealthy and give corporations the cash to buy back their stock. The lack of positive economic activity from these windfalls starved the economy and added large amounts to the deficit.
The only sane thing to do is to reinstate the tax rates as they existed when government programs were functioning to provide benefits to working- and middle-class people and corporations and wealthy individuals were contributing to the economy by having some of their money redistributed to the programs that generate economic activity among working- and middle-class people.
On a related note, …
I have spent parts of the last 24 hours jousting with defenders of the Catholic Church who are offended by the existence and activities of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group founded in 1979 that raises money for charities.
The Sisters were invited, disinvited, then invited to the LA Dodger Pride Night. They do not shrink from making acid remarks about the Church or using sacred items profanely.
What baffles me is people who twist themselves into knots of outrage about the Sisters yet cannot provide any evidence that they are being harmed by the group’s performative mischief.
If one wants to complain about people mocking one’s religious establishment at least demonstrate that one is actively working to rehabilitate the institution, to move it away from the transgressions that make it a target of ridicule.
Some interlocutors charged me with hating the Church for defending the Sisters and for pointing out the centuries of abuses perpetuated by the Church. I have no idea how that qualifies as hate.
Oh, well.