We have to stop looking at everything through these filters and start seeing what we're talking and voting about.
I get it if you vote to keep as much money as you make on each paycheck, simply because you don't make enough money. But consider if you're thinking at all about paychecks, you're simply not one of the many who never even know when they get a paycheck, just because they have so much money to begin with. You're in a different league altogether. Certainly a different social strata and definitely a different tax bracket.
But you can't vote because you do not want to be taxed or pay for someone else's healthcare. You have to expand your awareness as to why you don't make any money in the first place. Where is all that money going?
It's not just going to taxes. Because you're not, none of us are, paying ENOUGH in taxes. No one is anymore. Even though Republicans think cutting taxes is ALWAYS the answer. It's not. When you cut taxes as they have for years, down into the meat, into the bone, into the bone marrow of our country, then we have got to stop cutting taxes and start getting that money back into the government so it can once again be functional.
So, where is all that money?
When you finally do start making enough money per paycheck, for whatever reason, then you have to ask yourself, exactly when DO you have enough? According to the tenets of capitalism, you never do.
And that in itself is wrong. NO ONE ever should have as much money as a small nation because we live in a closed economic system. Either within our local municipality or nation or our entire planet. IF some take most of all the money, that becomes destructive to the whole, illiberal, unfair, and it should be outright illegal. Who fights against that? The wealthy, the powerful and then they convince the poor to argue in their place, and for their benefit.
We are so caught up in our concerns and considerations of "freedom" that we cannot even see all that to be true.
Belonging to a nation is a responsibility. You do not just get to live here for free, but you do have some inalienable rights. The wealthy want to live for free. So they must be held accountable. These grey areas that conservatives fight against in healthcare, judicial representation, and civil protections for police, fire and emergency care, should simply be rights. These are not and should not be privileges.
Because we have other things to pay for besides corporations or our massive military budget.
What the problem is here is that for many decades now, our priorities have been skewed from what they should be. We have heard too much derision and disinformation about socialism for instance. Before that it was communism. Before that probably a fear of freed slaves or of freeing slaves.
We have evolved and bettered ourselves and now we are at a point of backsliding and we need to stopgap it. End it. But fake news, the bastard child of spin has overtaken our media and our citizens.
Those who wish to stay in power have found it useful to abuse our political process and we find we are stuck with them. Beyond what is right. Beyond what is reasonable. We have had our taxes cut to where education has gone downhill. Easy access to instant media has polarized our beliefs. Beyond Russian dezinformatsiya (disinformation) which the Republican party has absconded with and made their own. Then they have turned about and blamed what they have done, when used against them, as "fake news".
We need to re-attenuate our own mental filters with real information, accurate news, truth and what is reasonable. We have to allow our ideas to fail, when they are bad ideas, rather than doubling down just to win, especially whenever it is in the worst interest of the country. Our method of democracy has been damaged, hopefully not permanently, but the abuse of politics and the discovery of disinformation.
We now have to deal with cyber attacks, hacking from Russia, China and elsewhere to a lesser extent from places like then North Korean hermit kingdom. So it is even more imperative that we get our beliefs, our filters, straightened out and correct.
It all stops with agreeing on what a fact is, on seeing the filters we use having the same basis in reality, the same criteria for what is fake and what is actual, and on our priorities being agreed upon.
Because aside from our filters are our priorities which have been broken for many decades now.
What are we, who are we first and foremost? Nationalists against all other countries and all other humans? Theists against all other religions or religion itself? Right or left leaning politicians against all others who disagree with us? Or just greedy or power hungry against all those we can walk upon in order to raise ourselves up above all others?
We have to decide these things. And we need to decide them very, very soon.
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