Political Oxymoron and other Weirdness

Progressive Republican seems like an oxymoron today. How could you possibly call anyone a progressive Republican? It’s absurd! It’s unthinkable! It’s completely alien and bizzare! And yet it wasn’t always this way.

Today we have Barack Obama as the leader of our country, one of the youngest presidents, and the first one of African descent. He is unique person who championed hope and reform in his campaign a few years ago. He has actually delivered quite a bit, despite the overwhelming media narrative that everything is a mess.

Well… how about President Teddy Roosevelt? He was a progressive Republican. He cracked down on corrupt and dangerous business practices, and fought hard to protect our natural resources. He helped found our first National Park. He was also a young leader, a champion of the workers. President Obama should take a page from his book. He’s got the speaking softly part down, but he needs a little help knowing when to use that big stick.

I urge you to look at the times in which President Teddy Roosevelt governed, and compare them to the current economic, ecological, and political circumstances in which Barack Obama finds himself as leader. To all you democrats out there; the fight we want may not have started yet, but don’t let that deceive you into giving up hope. As Bill Mahr said today, the left has moved to the center, and the right has moved into a mental institution. Do we really want to get dragged EVEN FURTHER to the right?!

We no longer live in the days of the Rooseveltian progressive Republican, but we can learn from the successes of the past if we just take the time to look at them.

Let’s look at the claim that is often made when someone on the left mentions real reform, especially on that touchy issue of “governing.” You know, spending money to run the government so that we can HAVE a government. Is it really so utopian to say that we should be able to provide a decent standard of living for every person in America? Actually, if you look at the numbers it is not far fetched.

Now, I live in an expensive place. I live in the heart of the best part of Los Angeles. Our family income is around $200,000 a year, which provides a very good standard of living. I, however, am the exception. If you take the total average GDP of our country and divide it by the total average population you get the per capita average of what we produce. It turns out this average is around $46,500 per year. That’s not super fantastic, but it’s fairly good, and that’s without accounting for people who might take up quite a bit fewer resources in a year, like children under the age of ten. I would think we could provide a decent standard of living for every person in this country, wouldn’t you?

Well, one problem is that we have a lot of people who are just obscenely wealthy. Not that I blame them, all the time. Some of them I’m sure are very nice, give lots to charity, and all the rest. However, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an all encompassing service that would take care of allocating this extra wealth for them? Well, the government can do that, if it is transparent, fair, and we all work a little to make sure they stay that way.

Taxes are not a bad thing. We need taxes. Without them we would have not government at all. We need the government to organize projects that we all need that individuals cannot organize for themselves. We need roads, bridges, public transportation, schools, police forces, firemen. Without taxes we would have none of these things. So should people making above $250,000 a year really be paying into this system less just because of a claimed crisis? The crisis won’t make it unnessary for us to have a running government. Can we afford to sacrifice the benefit that should be gained by everyone in favor of a slightly greater gain for a few? Even wealthy people need roads upon which to drive their solid gold sports cars. Would they be in favor of developing a system in which you could choose to not pay in, but in exchange you would receive no benefits? I think such a system would ultimately leave them out in the cold. They depend on the system as much as the poor person. They just don’t seem to realize it. I wonder why.

Let’s look at another problem. I call this “Not Seeing the Graph Syndrome.”

We did an experiment in my sixth grade science class where the teacher had us split in groups, and each group had to run a fishing company. We were all given the same amount of money, and this curious chart that showed a shape kind of like a hill with amount of fish on one axis, and date on the other. I really must assume all the other groups didn’t even bother with this graph, or they misread it. It was clear to me that this graph meant that beyond a certain point continuing to fish was a waste because after that point there would be no fish (it was cheapest to dock your boat). By the end, it turned out I was right. Everyone went completely broke as they fished for fish that did not exist. Our company was sitting pretty with our boats docked, and waiting patiently for the game to end.

I think this applies a lot in life, where even when the right answer is staring people in face they just can’t see it. I’m not sure why. However, I found this “science experiment” turned into a sociology experiment as I noticed the sheer percentage of the students who utterly failed to get the right answer because they didn’t even bother to look at it. Basically, we were told the answer and asked to repeat it. Why was this so hard to do? Unfortunately, we do this collectively as a society all the time with disastrous consequences, like overfishing.

I think we could all learn a lot from being shown how foolish we are before we do something really stupid. I like to hope the other kids in the class learned that they need to read the graphs they are given in life if they want to succeed.

To conclude let’s take a brief look at the word OVER.

Many problems seemed to be caused by excess. A lot of words associated with that have a negative connotation, and also have “over” in common; overconsumption, overpopulation, overfishing, overworking, etc. Moderation and balance are the keys to happiness, and yet sometimes we like to get overstimulated. However, overstimultation may be fun in the short term, but wait a little and it’ll make you sick and miserable. Perhaps if we look at the graph, look at the past, and really look at the world we will find the right graph, the right path, the path to sustainable happiness. All we have to do is look. The answers are right there in front of us. Like all living things the world provides for us the resources we need. We have the sun to give us energy; let’s use it’s energy more efficiently! We have water for us to drink, and bath in, let’s keep it clean and free of toxic chemicals! We have plenty of food if we just use a little common sense in our farming. We’ve got to stop mistreating animals. We’ve got to stop preventing natural processes like biodiversity. Right now we don’t have the answers, and until we really look to nature to provide them we’ll be hopelessly lost. It’s like we decided to create our own assignment and hope against all odds the teacher would accept it. It looks like we’re in for a failing grade if we don’t redo the assignment according to what the teacher wanted.