Posted by: Abel Collins
This writing is an excerpt from a novel that I am working on at the moment. I’d like to encourage you to share any reflections you might have. I could use the dialectic in my book:
Curious days. We assemble in a country and a nation: This shelter, a political society created to harbor free people; built with democratic architecture. We live in this structure, liberty guaranteed, and yet we are not free. We refuse democratic responsibilities, the sacrifices of self-government. Despite the best of intentions, we, the people, submit to the status quo, status infinitum, where wealth defines us. Despite our parroted words of freedom and equality, we are like the rest, divided into groups that can be boiled down into Masters, their henchmen, and slaves. We live in a democratic house, but we are not a democratic society. In the attic are dusty boxes filled with tarnished ideals. There was a spirit, a revolution, here once. There was an idea that we could govern ourselves justly and make a more perfect union. The emergence of these ideas is again at hand. We can no longer defer to the culture of greed that we have allowed to guide us to ruin. It is a new age for old questions. What is freedom, how shall we exercise it, what are our intentions, are we leaving this world better than we found it…?
We must find the answers to these questions together. We, the people.
Abel my good man - well posed, and I'm right there with you.
ReplyDeleteI fully acknowledge my role as henchman. Yet who does one consider the slaves and who the masters in this day and age?
I tend to look at it through a socio-economic lens. The masters I would classify as that two percent of the population who controls more than fifty percent of the stock in our nation's corporations. I feel we have devolved into a corporatocracy, and the people who control the corporations effectively control the US. It is little surprise that this two percent has not changed much demographically over the centuries (Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.). Wealth once accumulated stays concentrated, and it is, in fact, as bad today as it has ever been in our history. Howard Zinn does a good job of documenting the classism of wealth in his 'People's History.'
ReplyDeleteThe slaves in this society are the 80% of people who control only 15% of the total wealth in the country. They have no say in their own governance, political or economic, because the politicians have been captured by corporate interests. This is the vast majority of americans who toil away at stressful demeaning jobs to simply tread water. The terminology for these people is wage-slaves. There is limited upward mobility for this class to move up into the ranks of the henchmen.
ReplyDeleteTo me the henchmen are the most interesting class of people, and I think I might devote a blog to it.
ReplyDeleteAhh - well then I'm probably not not the henchman I thought I was Abel. I surmise that politicians and other gross enablers make up the remaining 18% in your interpretation.
ReplyDeleteI was trying to look at it from a slightly different approach - maybe the slaves are those with their corporate jobs - forced out into suburbia with 2hr commutes, keepup-with-Joneses cars, houses and techno-gadgetry - yet coerced to live life beholden to paying for the mistakes and misfortunes of others.
While the masters are those who do little and reap the benefits of their place in society..
and please tell me who to vote for on Tuesday..
ReplyDeleteSchompton, you are a lucky man to be one of the fabled voters that might control the near term future of health care. I have considerable antipathy for both Democrats and Republicans, and I really don't think the proposed health care reform is any good. However, it is a start, and we do need to get started in providing citizens with better health. For that reason alone, I recommend voting for Coakley. I hope come November that some viable third party candidates come forward to break the strangle hold corporations currently hold over the two party system.
ReplyDeleteI love George Carlin's take on it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q&feature=player_embedded
A tumultuous tortured night of tossing and turning.. Acknowledging the need for health care reform, I would take umbrage with the concept of 'providing citizens with better health'. Steps moving away from personal accountability are in the wrong direction - regardless, I'd have a tough time voting for the Mass Machine up here. Although I dislike the concept of voting in a 41st-vote obstructionist as well - but either way I'd say 'message received' and if the administration wants to avoid a number of repeat occurences this Fall, they'll recraft the health care legislation to make it a bit more palatable..
ReplyDeleteAlas, the entire political machine is at this point obstructionist. Your vote if it was for Coakley could help get health care reform started. The legislation as it stands is inadequate. I don't particularly care whether it is the government or the private sector that provides health care to the people in the end, so long as it is provided equitably and at a reasonable cost. I, too, am a great fan of personal accountability, but I think that applies to whatever system is devised. Importantly, I'd like to see health care focused on prevention through healthier lifestyles rather than primary care, hospital care, and pharmaceuticals.
ReplyDeleteAnd with that, let's welcome Scott Brown to the political fray. I hope he has a clue as to what his constituents want. CHANGE
ReplyDelete