Opinion/Editorial
ARE YOU ALL IN?
Is it our lengthy lifespans that tend to make us so competitively selective against other members of our own species? Do we live too long? Dogs live seven to ten years and seem to get along fine. Cats live ten to twenty years and the same goes there. Oh, they chase and kill other animals but generally not their own. Some elephants, whales, and tortoises (not to mention Macaws) can live a hundred years or more, but maybe because they are not omnivores or predators, they have less inclination to commit violence or heinous other kinds against members of their own species.
Humans are special. In the blink of an eye some members of the human species ‘divide and conquer’ with their leadership positions and power. They can decide that vaccinations are bad (for the virus) and get so many people to believe them that other members of the species die from following what they have said. This form of hurting people is commonly minimized in conversation and presentation by going straight to the ‘there’s not enough of everything for everyone so the things we have must be carefully doled out and difficult decisions, hurting some to help others, must be made’ argument.
In America, not the whole world covering all the living members of the human species, there is so much wealth that no single human should ever have to starve to death, live in the streets, have no medical care or shelter, or any of that. But the reality of living in the USA not only has loads of those things going on (people starving, homeless, ill, hurt, and more) but has almost the entirety of the rest of the population living in fear (usually in only the very depths of their minds) of ending up in experiencing one or more of those conditions.
Not long ago, in fact, only three years back, most of the political leaders around the USA, national and state, projected and spoke about the very limited resources available to the part of the human species living in America. The fixing of bridges, roads, trains, space travel…all those things were boldly spoken about as being too expensive to pursue. Then the virus struck. Somehow, out of nowhere (or like the lyrics of that song “making love out of nothing at all,”) three trillion dollars was allotted to ‘bail the public out.’ Then another two trillion was allotted. Now, three trillion is being considered for the Infrastructure Plan and several trillion more for the Jobs plan. That money came from the wealth structure of America that most citizens have no clue about because they are not told about any of it. Offshore accounts, held by all the nation’s billionaires, are ‘proprietary’ in nature and therefore cannot be known about. Stock purchases and sales, taxes and so much more are considered the same. The Department of Defense, just before the 9/11 strike in New York, was missing 2.1 trillion dollars that were totally unaccounted for.
Secretary Rumsfeld had just announced that there was going to be a complete audit of the entire department and its spending records. A week later 9/11 went down and that was the last thing ever heard about the audit. These many trillions of dollars I have mentioned in this article (and you can fact check immediately on the Internet) would have paid for all the food, shelter, medical and educational needs of the entire population of the U.S. (if the money had been spent that way) for at least twenty years! But what happened? The leaders of the governments decided that some should benefit, among the humans getting the money and help, and some should not.
For example, Elon Musk and his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) got 4.9 billion dollars. United Airlines got 10 billion, General Motors got 4 billion and General Electric got 3.5 billion. Not one of those entities or leaders of those entities paid a single dollar in taxes for all of 2019 and 2020. How much did you pay and how much did you get? When will the population go ‘all in’ and come together to fix this mess of human beings basically killing other humans’ beings to get their stuff? As President Obama so brilliantly said during the last year of his second term: “no company in the country has made it on its own. If they have then let us remove that company’s electricity, water supply, gas, roads, and trains, and see how that company or the company’s do.” The rise of civilization in the USA has been as a result of all of the humans living within and without its borders throwing together for the benefit of all, but when things change to the extent that they have over the past twenty years, and the money and stuff begin to be divided up and given only to favorites then the civilization must eventually fall. The rest of the culture will, one day, just quit going along. Are you all in yet, or not?
