Socialism column

ou wake up in the morning. Your restless night’s sleep over; your brain suddenly re-boots and all of the stress of the day before is back in an instant. Immediately your body starts to react to it and your health begins to slowly but steadily deteriorate from it.

You must live in the United States, where the almighty dollar is worshipped. You have trouble living a happy life because you just don’t have enough of those dollars to handle all of your obligations. You watch while elected politicians and their corporate cronies rake in big money and wave their capitalist flags in your face, breaking laws and laughing about it. They have friends in very high places.

You get in your beat-up old car that cost you five hundred bucks to fix, and go out looking for a job, since you lost yours last week when things got slow. No matter; it didn’t pay all that much anyway and there was no health insurance or 401K attached to it so the first time you got sick they probably would have fired you, since you hadn’t been there long enough to get sick days or a vacation, which you have not had in many years, except for that two weeks a year you got when you worked for the factory.

That job was okay, but then they shipped their work to Mexico where labor was cheaper, so they closed the place down. Out you went, on unemployment for six months, which is how long it took you to find another job that paid somewhere near the same money.

Then you had the baby and when she got sick you and your husband were out of work so much that you almost lost everything you had trying to keep your heads above water keeping up with the doctors and medicines, but, despite the best care you could afford, she didn’t make it.

While your life was happening, big banks and insurance companies were robbing the public blind, and when they got found out they got a nice big bailout from the government. A sweet reward for very bad behavior. “Too big to fail,” they called it. That’s the way it is here in the United States.

Then came a new regime in Washington, similar in a lot of ways to the old one but different enough to make some people begin to scream about the dreaded “Socialism.” You’ve heard about it, vaguely, in reference to medicine. Not good, is what the voices on the radio said.

Imagine a place where you had free health care, free child care, a retirement system that was far better than Social Security, free college for all your kids, paid sick days, six weeks of paid vacation every year (my goodness, a week every two months!), a good job re-training program if you lost your employment, paid parental leave for both parents if you have a child, and free senior care for later in life.

That is what Socialism is. That is what the big players in this country have told you is evil. Why? Is it because it costs more in taxes to provide all of that to you, which it does? Is it because it’s a big trick to make you slaves to the government, which it isn’t? No. They don’t like it because it means that the government looks out for people instead of corporations. It means less money in their pockets and more in yours. People would actually be more equal, a scary proposition for them.

How many of you would you be willing to pay more taxes to get rid of all of the stress in your life that you have because you don’t have all of the things mentioned above? I’m betting most of you would, if you knew the truth.

Imagine that.