I’m going to say this…and some of you aren’t going to like it.
The law of the jungle states that the strong survive and the weak perish. I believe that to the depth of my soul. I believe 75% of the problems we have as a society are due to the fact that we have been trying to defy that law for the last ninety years.
Now…before y’all start cussing me and discussing unmanageable physical fitness standards and the effects of aging, that’s not entirely what I’m talking about. It’s much more than that. Strength of character…strength of intelligence…faith, humanity, creativity, decency, work ethic, family values, community values…strength is found in a lot more than just the ability to move heavy objects.
Somewhere in the aftermath of the Great Depression the social programs that were put in place to pull us out of that mess became a standard. Americans learned to rely on the government to solve their problems. Had those programs been used as a temporary means to get us back on the straight and narrow and then abandoned so we could pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, they’d have been great. But they became a way of life. They became a factor in our economy. Reliance on those programs became our weakness…and made the government too strong. Just to reiterate…the strong survive and the weak perish.
Believe it or not, we used to look out for each other. We used to grow more than we needed just in case our neighbor’s garden didn’t do well. We watched over the children of the community as if they were a precious commodity…simply because they are. We looked after our elders and valued the knowledge they had to pass down. As a species and a society our greatest strength was found in the fact that we took care of our own. You may not be able to cut a straight line with a saw but you can grow great tomatoes…you may suck in the garden but you raise great layer chickens…or maybe you’re dumb as a stump, but you can throw hay bales all day long. There was a place for everyone in the community to earn a living through a trade of some sort…and when someone fell by the wayside we (as a community) picked them up, dusted them off and helped them get back on track. The entire town would show up to help raise a barn, or paint a church or clean the city park…we didn’t let our neighbors go hungry…we passed our hand-me-down clothes directly to someone in need…we stopped what we were doing to help a neighbor fix something. WE took care of each other.
So…what killed that? What could destroy a community spirit like that? Maybe…just maybe…Welfare, Food Stamps, Unemployment, etc., etc., etc. Half of our society has allowed themselves to become dependent on government programs. The other half is pissed off at the first half because their paychecks are ate up with taxes to pay for those programs…and nobody’s talking sensibly about it.
Take the dollar figures out of the equation for the time being and just look at the social aspect of it. In the simplest of forms…Bob used to do handyman work for friends and they would in turn, send him home with garden produce or eggs or baked goods. The government gave Bob an EBT card, so he and his family are fed from the government hand every month and he no longer feels the need to do handyman work. Yet the money his friends used to invest in the garden, chickens or baking ingredients is now being TAKEN from their payroll taxes, property taxes and sales taxes to pay for Bob’s EBT card. Who wins in this situation? It’s not the friends….they’re losing money that they could’ve been using to do something productive for their community or saved for their vacation or retirement. Ahhhh….but it’s not Bob either…sitting on your ass eating government purchased Twinkies will drive you into an early grave, and if Bob goes to work to save some money for his future he risks losing his EBT card. The government wins here. Bob is beholden to them for his family’s livelihood and his self-respect suffers because his friends see him as a freeloader…his old friends have lost buying power and now have to work twice the hours to make the same amount of money they did before the EBT cards were issued…neither have gained anything…they’ve become weaker and the government has become stronger. Again….to reiterate….The strong survive and the weak perish.
If you look at every government program from a social perspective instead of a economic perspective they all do the exact same thing. EVERY “social program” takes power from the people and gives it to the government…and in doing so, we’re slowly destroying our society.
I get a little pissy every time I hear someone say something like “No child should ever go hungry in this country”. Not because whoever saying it is wrong…hell, I agree with them 100%. But, that statement is always followed by something along the lines of “That’s why we need to implement my 1.5 trillion dollar plan to combat child hunger”. No…that’s not what you need…you need the people of the community that child lives in to take an interest in perpetuation of our species, but they can’t take time to worry about that because they’re working 70 hours a week to keep their own family afloat due to the fact that the first 20 hours of pay they make every week is going to taxes to fund your last damn 1.5 trillion dollar brainstorm. It’s a never ending cycle, ladies and gents and they keep conning us into playing their game through poverty porn and guilt. I’ll let you in on a little secret though…we’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. That child is more than likely hungry because you can’t raise a family on a single parent working as a mechanic in this day and age….you could forty years ago. Hell, just sixty years ago, if you’re dad was a decent mechanic you could live a pretty comfortable life in this country and your Mom was home waiting for you when you got off the bus from school. Did you change that? I know I didn’t. The government caused this mess…they’re the reason poverty exists in this country…they’re the reason children are going hungry…and yet they want you to vote for them and their $1,500,000,000 plan to spend YOUR money and the money of that mechanic with the starving children.
SO….I’ve got a newsflash for ya. I’m going to tell you guys something that you probably already know somewhere deep down inside you. Bernie Sanders isn’t trying to bring socialism to America. It’s already here, folks. All the “social programs” I’ve been talking about…That’s socialism in a nutshell….the government redistribution of the nation’s wealth. We’re not into full blown socialism yet, but we’ve been tinkering with it for almost a hundred years now…we’ll just call it “Socialism Lite” for right now…and the whole damn system is being held together with scotch-tape and old frayed shoe laces.
Ya want to know the bitch of it all? There’s no way to stop it. Even if you reversed gears right now and tried to set things straight we’re in a hole that’s been too deep for decades and everybody’s plan for recovery was to keep digging. In 2016 we voted a guy into office who is hell bent on stopping it and you see the shit the system engineers have put him through. I’d like to tell you that this is all conspiracy theory on my part, but my West Virginia public school education did a pretty fair job of teaching me math. My mentors taught me how to solve problems. The streets did a pretty fair job of teaching me how to spot a con. I can’t find a viable solution…I don’t know that anyone could. But I know if you think the morons that have made fortunes from a life in government are the answer you really need to read a history book.
Now….the good news and the bad news here are the same: This isn’t sustainable for much longer. It really is a house of cards and it’s all going to come tumbling down sooner or later. The national debt is currently around 24 trillion dollars. That’s Trillion…with a T. Let me put that in perspective…you could spend 32 million dollars a day every day since 01/01/0001 A.D. and not reach our national debt. Go ahead and check my math….I’ll wait. Yep….$32,000,000 a day since the son of your God walked the Earth. I don’t know about you, but one days worth of that is more money than I can even fathom.
That’s not the worst of it though…The position of strength we’ve given the government has bred corruption at every level and the people we employ as politicians have stopped worrying about the power of the government and started concerning themselves with their own personal wealth. When that house of cards collapses, it’s going to make the Great Depression look like a small bounced check. It’s going to suck…plain and simple. That’s the bad news. The good news is we’re going to get to start over. When everything zeroes out, the people will have the position of power again and all that money the politicians have lined their pockets with will be worthless.
Think about it for a second and you’ll see what’s got this in the forefront of my mind tonight. The stock market has fallen 33% in the last three weeks…nobody can remember the last time the national debt was in decline…every Presidential candidate has a “trillion dollar plan” to solve whatever problem you bring to them…they all say it with a smile on their face and act like the money’s coming from petty cash…and they’re all going to raise that money by tripling your taxes…now they’re talking about issuing us all checks to help us get through this virus and nobody has mentioned yet that those “economic relief checks” are going to simply add to the national debt and we’re going to have to pay that back sooner or later. The math doesn’t work, folks…and we’re getting to the point where the scotch tape isn’t going to hold it together much longer.
Okay…This part is important…so follow along. Y’all know me…I’m not some idiot with a bomb shelter dug into the hillside packed with five years worth of survival gear and chow. But I will preach this from the hilltops for it’s the one thing I know to be true: The strong survive and the weak perish. Start teaching the kids how to be strong…and you may want to toughen up yourself a little bit. The time’s coming when money won’t fix the problems. It’s going to take a community effort…on a national level…hell, maybe on a species level.
I don’t know if we’ll see it in our lifetime…but it sure feels like we’re on the cusp of something big.
Be strong, my friends.