Obama, Mitt and how we can create real change…reflections on the debate

The last thing I should be doing today is writing a blog post since I have oodles of work for the day job and I am trying to wrap up a submission for paying work and these days I need all the paying work I can get. But after watching last night’s debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, I just had to blog. Shit, Mitty is the gift that keeps on giving a like a case of untreated clap.

For starters can I just say that at the end of the day, I feel like almost all politicians are disconnected from the realities of modern life in America. Instead we are being sold this dream that one day good jobs and prosperity will be ours again and frankly, I think that shit is gone with the wind. We are all Scarlett O’Hara looking for tomorrow and well, we will just be waiting. Modern technology and advancement has made many jobs obsolete, it’s really not that hard of a concept to grasp. Most of the growth industries are low paying service jobs that are actually very much needed, someone needs to wipe our asses in the nursing home and it’s the type of gig that can’t be outsourced. Yet we will dance around the fact that these types of jobs need higher wages.

Politicians love to speak to the middle class and I am sure at one point in time that was a great strategy, the problem is the true middle class is almost dead. Most of us have slid down into the working class but in a nation that only likes upward mobility, none of us are addressing the elephant in the room. So, we allow our politicians to talk of this middle class and we still believe the dream that we ourselves are middle class. Funny thing is today’s middle class looks a lot like the working class of decades past. For most of us in the so-called middle class, if we lost our jobs and didn’t replace them right away, within a year or two if we were lucky, we would be taking up resident in the local homeless shelter or living in a cardboard box. Today’s middle class has little in the way of real assets with our homes that are often worth a lot less than they used to be, serving as our only real asset.  Wages are stagnant and the cost of everything is up, most of us play the bill shuffle game which is better than our friends in the real poor class who can’t even play that game; but let’s stop being delusional, we aren’t middle class. In 2012 in America, there are the rich and then there are the rest of us with a few levels of the rest of us. However as long as we can buy that $4.59 pumpkin latte occasionally, still use our credit cards and present as middle class, that’s our story and we are sticking to it.

So it’s no surprise that politicians play along with us since we ourselves aren’t comfortable with truth then again Americans in general don’t like the truth. We like myths and fairy tales, they make us feel better. It’s why being a wedding planner is a great business and from my view damn near recession proof; we will go into debt to have one perfect day because we somehow believe that one perfect day will make for a great life.

On that note, politicians are funny and Mitt Romney is even funnier. I think it’s clear that he and running mate Paul “pump me up” Ryan think that women need to know their place (get yo ass home by 5pm to cook dinner now, ya here) after all Mitt cares about you broads. Mitt cares so much so that when he was governor of Massachusetts he had a binder full of women to find good ones to work in his administration.

I learned last night that if we want to decrease violence in our society that we need more two parent households, again 2 parents in a shared space is magical, bad shit never ever happens when you have two parents in a home. Never mind that half the guys in recent decades, who have snapped and committed mass murder, generally came from 2 parent households. Perhaps there is violence because we are a violent nation, we care less about the least among us instead paying lip service to the least among us but stripping away every useful service that people need to not be violent. Treatment for mental health, real services to lift the poor up, again, all shit that is gone with the wind and while I am talking about Mitt Romney, our friends in blue the Democrats don’t do much for the truly poor either.

Maybe I am growing old and losing my own shit, but I am starting to think that to create real and humane change that creates an environment where we all can thrive is for us, that’s you and me to be an active part of the community. It means more than watching a debate and voting, it’s about being present in our communities, knowing our neighbors, doing business with our neighbors and with millions of people creating change at a micro level maybe just maybe we will see some change at the macro level. Yet to take even that step means we need to put away the fairy tales and stop waiting for others to save us.

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