SHARED SACRIFICE?

The budget fight is the lead story on every newscast and has been for quite some time.  No one doubts that we need to cut spending significantly to lower our debt.  This is our current crisis.  When a people face a crisis, their best and worst qualities come to the front.  The morality of the people and their cause, it seems to me, is marked by whether the best or worst traits dominate the discourse.

The potential spending cuts on the table now involve defunding education, family planning, Head Start, heating assistance, public broadcasting, Medicaid, and a wide range of other service programs.  Most of these programs serve the most vulnerable among us, people who are so used to being hidden, with no power that the politicians who vote to remove these services will reap no negative effects.  Once it’s done, we all can say, “What could I do?  Some other, local groups will step up to bridge the gap.” Honestly, though, we know that’s not true and that we allowed our worst traits to rule.

I brought this issue up with my students yesterday.  We discussed the idea that the “haves” may be actively working to maintain a permanent underclass of people who can fill the jobs that immigrants currently fill, you know, the jobs supposedly nobody wants.  My students were distressed, not knowing how to respond to the idea that one group would do such a thing to fellow citizens. 

Where are the cuts in subsidies to the wealthy companies?  Where is the regulation to protect the environment?  Where are the closed loopholes that will require the wealthiest few to pay their fair share of the taxes to support our nation?  Where is the end to the wars that enrich the wealthy contractors who just happen to be supplying the weapons, the mercenaries, the supplies that keep the wars going?

There is no shared sacrifice, only one group suffers, the one that always feels the pain, but ends up buying the line that one day they too could be among the privileged few.  Such deception and abandonment make us  as a nation, in this crisis, morally bankrupt.

Peace (not likely),

Ruth