Shares

Reading through blog feeds on Google Reader this morning I was brought up short by Tom Degan's blog the Rant. He used two quotes that I feel free to pass on:

Donna Cusano posted on her facebook page the following:

"The homeless go without eating. The elderly go without medicine. The mentally ill go without treatment. Troops go without proper equipment. Veterans go without benefits that were promised to them. Yet we give billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% of Americans -- those who need it least. ..."

In his New York Times column Charles Blow summed things up thus:

"Under the guise of deficit reduction, the Republicans are proposing to not only make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, but to reduce their taxes even more — cutting the top individual rate from 35 percent to 25 percent to "promote growth and job creation." And they plan to pay for this by taking a buzz saw to programs that benefit the poor, elderly and otherwise vulnerable."

Mr. Degan goes on to seriously question what the Republican Party, in their current tea stained incarnation, can possibly be thinking. Have they succumbed to the allure of wealth and plutocracy, as I believe they have, or have they simply lost their minds?

On this latter question I am reminded of a recurring response that my students gave during a study of the Jewish Holocaust. When confronted with the question of how any sane person could inflict such barbarism, they would simply answer that the perpetrators were, of course, not sane.

I do not doubt the sanity of Adolf Hitler or his henchmen; or of Mussolini, or Stalin, or of ... I could go on and on. What I believe is that their vision of humanity and their place in it was and is fundamentally different from my own, different to the point of being labeled evil today.

Do I consider the actions and viewpoints of the current far right evil? I do. What they are spouting and what they are planning and doing flies in the face of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic heritage that has supposedly shaped modern America and its mores. To go fourth into the battle and triumph is laudable, whether that battle be in defense of your homeland or on the floor of the world's stock exchanges. But as King David reminded his soldiers, "As the share is of him who goes down to the battle, so is the share of him who stays with the baggage." (I Samuel 30:24 The Jerusalem Bible)

State of Maine GOP Chairman Charlie Webster, as if to echo the words of David's soldiers 3000 years ago, proclaims, ""The Democrats want to tax the working class and distribute it to those who don't work."

Although this would be true only if thousands of hard working employed Maine people could be classified as "those who don't work" and only those in the upper echelons of income could be considered "the working class", I can, never-the-less, hear David's response.

It is true that government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy is plutocracy and as such must be avoided by those who believe in freedom, liberty and justice for all. That being the case, why are sane persons, in the name of American virtue, so ardently advocating it?