photo by Kat Berger via mkeonline dot com
Senator Schumer, doing his usual appropriation of rightwing talking points, was quoted in the LA Times recently: (Democrats need to) “push aside the special interests and always keep our eye on the average American family.”
Wow, Senator, what keen insight you have. Who, pray tell, is this chimera you speak of, this “average American family?
Does this family include the closeted gay son, afraid to admit to his friends, his parents, his clergyman, to himself, who he really is? Is he average, filled by society’s hate and fear and loathing, as he contemplates his future in a society that doesn’t want the likes of him, as thoughts of suicide bedevil him … is he, a citizen of this country denied his equal rights under the law, is HE an “average American”?
Does this family include the woman in the hospital, staring down the barrel of an aggressive cancer and a doomed pregnancy, facing the possibility of a more dangerous procedure because the oh-so-learned politicians in this country hope to make safer late-term abortions illegal to pander to one particular religious point of view? Does this family include the husband and children who have to go on without her after infection or complications take her life?
Does this family include the children left home alone as their mother works two jobs to keep food on the table?
Does this family include the mother left with nothing but a flag, her memories and her sorrow, her precious child dead in the sand of a foreign land, a land decimated by a criminal war rubberstamped by the jingoistic hawks beside you in the halls of Congress?
Does this family include the one who’s father has been deported to the foreign land he left decades ago?
Does this family include the one decimated by the draconian laws of our drug war, their mother sent away for mere possession of an herb that grows like a weed in nearly every corner of the earth?
Does this family include the worker who stood in a long line, in the rain, waiting to vote on a broken machine, or worse a machine that doesn’t register her vote?
Does this family include the increasing number of children struggling against chronic asthma, drowning in the particulate-saturated air poured out by polluting industries who buy off both your’s and the “other” political party?
Tell me, Senator, just what is this “average American family”, of which “average Americans” is it constituted?
Please, Sir, tell me … these people who face challenges that you apparently can’t even imagine, to whom are they to turn when EVERY institution in this country fails to address their problems? When political parties pander to loud, fractious, bigoted and superstitious minorities, rapacious corporations and corrupt wealthy contributors … who then do people turn to to make their voices heard? Those self same organizations that you denigrate as “special interests”, of course.
Is the Chamber of Commerce a “special interest”? How about the credit card industry, recently rewarded with a law that enables their increasingly usurious behavior? Hollywood .. what about them, with their demands that culture be straitjacketed into business-plan-protection schemes with wrong-headed copyright “reforms”? Are THEY a “special interest? Maybe you’d think of Big Pharma, or the defense industries, or the increasingly out-of-reach higher education system as “special interests”? Maybe you think of the HMOs, the increasingly profitable insurance companies that do everything they can to avoid paying out to their policy holders … are THEY “special interests”?
No?
Probably not. They, after all, line your pockets, line the pockets of your fellow politicians, your lobbying family members. They pay for your hand-tailored suits, no doubt delivered right to your office. Do you have any idea what the average American has to do, the ill-fitting suits bought off the rack, on high-priced credit, required to keep a job that fails to keep up with his mounting costs?
None of this is in your little grifter’s mind, sir, and we all know it. When you talk of “average Americans”, you are aping the Republicans, playing games with people’s resentments, their fears, their prejudices and hatreds. You hope that when the easily-duped “centrist” voters, running in place in their tract homes, hear those words, that they will think, “that’s MY FAMILY” and not some other family that you and the other hacks running the Democratic Party are preparing to abandon to the vagaries of the marketplace, the swirling waters of the floods, the flesh-stripping winds of a far-flung desert.
When you spew forth terms like “average American”, you are appealing to DIVISION. You are appealing to fear and anger and bigotry and homophobia and misogyny and all of the other cancers bedeviling the American soul, because you, sir, are little different from the characters in the other party. Hell, you want to BE the other party, and you are unwilling or unable to see that this country is crying out for political leaders who will address the problems facing the greater majority of Americans. There is no “average” American. Averages are mathematical constructs, fake distinctions, the province of the accountant and the statistician, NOT the realm inhabited by real leaders, visionary leaders.
Sadly, though, the people look around and find no leaders. We’re offered hazy rememberances of murdered leaders dead decades ago, and cold stone monuments to unfulfilled dreams. No, we are left mainly with wealthy corrupt hacks like you, with conmen masquerading as statesmen, liars instead of giants. You can’t find it within yourself to offer unity and shared ground, only more division and lazy Hallmark sentiment.
We will get nowhere in this country, we will continue down our disasterous path, as long as we allow ourselves to be divided with such talk. Workers, families, men, women and children need to face the basic truth that none of us are free until ALL of us are free. Labor will get nowhere until women have control of their bodies. Families will never find steady ground until ALL families can find equal protection under the law to secure their future, their assets, their right to love one another. You, Senator Schumer, contribute to ugly divisions already exploited and incited by the ugly tactics of the Republican Party, and for that you should be ashamed.
Please, sir, contemplate these words, spoken by a soon-to-be slaughtered leader to commemorate the loss of Dr. King, for whom more cold stone is to be erected beside the memorial of another murdered hero:
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(Interrupted by applause)
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.
Sadly, I doubt that you have it within your cold, cynical heart to look upon those words with anything but a smirk. There are no “average Americans” sir, there is only us, your fellow citizens, the people who entrusted you with high office, looking for leadership, not cynical exploitation. A people who might very well rise to support a party that bothered to embrace them and the organizations that they turned to for lack of anywhere else to make their voices heard. If you or the other Democrats can’t offer them that opportunity, I promise you that the other party will offer up a demogogue to further feed on their fear and desperation, and if we go down that road, this long experiment in representative Democracy will come to its bitter end.