I was checking out The Herald’s editorial cartoons 0nline and one had Democrats jumping off the socialism cliff like lemmings are mistakenly thought to do.
If one checks out historic political cartoons, they’ll find a slew of these types of socialism fear stories, When we established Social Security, Medicare, the EPA, and even national parks, the rallying cry on the right was always the dangers of socialism. Everybody was a pinko it seems.
Words are beguiling as everyone knows. One can call virtually any intrusion into the affairs of capitalism’s elites socialism. What we should be arguing isn’t the “isms” of black and white “thinking” with its inevitable tribalistic stupidity. What we should be arguing is how much we are willing to pay so that average Americans can afford college, daycare and, at the very least, decent health care.
An overwhelming percentage want the government to support these things. Sure, at some point, if a government gets too intrusive and too greedy for power, that will kill a strong economy and do more harm than good for average people but we all also know that capitalism unchecked concentrates wealth at the top and is essentially sociopathic in that the interests of business are often cruel and completely insensitive to those it exploits.
History reveals this to be a hard fact. It’s not and never will be a perfect system, because people suck. We all know this too. All I’m asking is that we stop sounding and acting cruelly and stupidly and end this “ism” nonsense and get down to the hard work of figuring out how to make our society a place we can call caring and intelligent. Pointing fingers and talking about socialism and capitalism in black and white terms is clearly the opposite of that.
Rick Walker
Snohomish
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