The Bush Legacy: The Real Danger
Dueling federal deficit explanations. Traditional right wing folks are complaining about the danger now of the increasing deficit and how it’s going to undermine our economy. Many progressive folks find that really frustrating and want to get in their face about the fact that Clinton left things in the black and Bush took them deep into the red. But the question is: while the right wing doesn’t want to acknowledge Bush’s part, are our progressive folks prepared to acknowledge that the deficit is much worse because Obama has continued the very policies that Bush was burying us with?
We could point to the deficit as Bush’s lasting legacy; we could point to the really horrific situation of our entire economy. Bush took us very far down the road towards deregulation and tax breaks for the very wealthy and all the things that were suppose to increase gross domestic product and lead to the creation of lots of private sector jobs. Of course, we ended up with the fewest jobs created in any upturn. In the private sector, there was no net gain of jobs. Obviously those policies didn’t work in creating jobs; they didn’t work for GDP either.
The huge loans and loan guarantees to not just banks and international banks but most of the financial industry has happened on Obama’s watch: 23 trillion dollars. We already knew we were headed for an intermingling of corporate and top government interests under Bush. There’s been no turn around on that, nor a turn around on how many soldiers we have around the world, and how many are getting killed and killing and coming home with less medical coverage. There seems no change in how many fronts our imperial presidency is willing to fight on. Nor have we seen some great divorce between government policy and the interests of big oil; BP being only just the very large tip of the iceberg but it’s a disaster.
The real need right now more than anything is the capacity of people across the United States, regular people to stand together, to see in each other’s eyes our future destiny.
The predominantly white farmers of the Massachusetts colony were early, early callers for the end of slavery before we had even thrown off the British. They understood their situation and that rich folks owning slaves was not helping. When women fought for the right to vote, and yes had to go to the point of death in some cases, they eventually convinced men to voted it because our voting made sense for all of us. The Bread and Roses Strike where they say 38 different languages were spoken and yet workers came together was central to the strikes of that time period; they ended infinitely mandated overtime and all sorts of unhealthy working conditions. We have a proven capacity across great differences to realize our interests as regular people are shared, are, in fact, interdependent.
Problem: we’re not seeing this right now. Here we sit with the widest economic divide between the very wealthy (at this point a truly small number of incredibly wealthy people who have made money even since the market crashed) and the rest of us.
But for average folks if we’re not unemployed, somebody we know is unemployed. If we haven’t lost our homes, somebody down the block has lost their home. If it’s not our kids that we’re putting to bed hungry, our kids are going to school with kids who went to bed hungry. If we still have health coverage that we can actually afford and access, well, the person next door probably doesn’t have it. God only knows how long it will take for all of us to get sick when such a huge percent of folks can’t access care; we are all swimming in a soup of ill health. There have been huge wage cuts. And the list continues.
So we’re not divided from each other in this sinking ship, not in reality. But the great danger is almost no matter who I talk to and where they sit on the political spectrum, they haven’t figured out yet that as regular people, we’re all stuck in this together. It’s all about “oh, this person’s this” or “this person’s that” or “I can’t trust that group” or “I’m only willing to talk to the people who already agree with me” or “it’s too scary to talk to strangers because they might disagree, be angry.”
At a fundamental level, the vast majority of issues, however, we all agree on. When we only fight over moving the deck chairs to where we want them, we can’t agree. If we actually got to sealing the hull so that this titanic we’re living in doesn’t go under, we are already all on the same page.
There’s really only one reason we’re not recognizing this: we’ve been taught to fear each other.
I know folks who think of themselves as progressive tend to say, “it’s the other people who are the fear mongers; we’re in it for everybody” but scratch a little below the surface and folks who define themselves as progressive don’t want to door knock the door of a stranger if they can possibly help it. I hear people dismiss others as stupid, as “voting against their own interests”, that local control is anti-progressive.
We really need to search out how we’ve been poisoned by a politics of fear. It seeped in. The person who is wearing the tea party t-shirt next to us we are certain is against us. Or the person who stumbles and says something that degrades another group or somebody who holds a political position that we disagree with – I hear it repeated all the time now: they must have bad motivation and sinister reasons for disagreeing with us.
Almost none of us strive any longer for interactions, behaviors, even policies that would nurture a truly healthy democracy. I almost never hear really genuine belief in that profound democratic concept that we are in fact all created equal and that we all have a right to (I like the initial formulation that the Worcester colonists fought for) life, liberty, and the means of sustenance. As regular people that is what we really need, what we have always needed. We have lost our understanding that our survival as regular people depends on the survival of all regular people. We live in poisonous fear which literally leaches the life blood out of democracy.
We need to stop being the purveyors of the legacy of fear. It is destroying our capacity to reverse our economy, the war policies, the environmental situation. We will be impotent because we can’t reach across the table, can’t walk across the street, can’t look the stranger in the eye and know that they are potentially not only our friend but our colleague in the fight for a better world for all of us. And we literally cannot get there without them.
We need to look deep into our hearts and at the risk of seeming ridiculous, rediscover the love that transforms the possibility of democracy into a reality.
Grace Ross, former candidate for governor, coordinator of the Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending and long-time community activist. She is author of newly released "Main Street $marts: who got us into this economic mess and how we get through it."
