OPEN LETTER TO REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS

by Ruth A. Sheets

Dear 2020 era Republicans,

Wow!  There seem to be no depths to which many of you will not go these days.  Even in the midst of a pandemic, you worry more about coddling huge corporations than taking care of the PPE (protective gear) needs of front-line workers.  You cover for every misstep Mr. Trump makes as he fumbles his way through challenges that he neither understands nor really cares about.  You in the Senate of the United States continue to approve nominees from partisan operatives to stack our courts with people you are pretty sure will be unfair to most of the people of this country, you know, the ones that are not rich, white, straight “Christian” males.  You are OK with the Senate being neutered by Mr. McConnell for his own purposes, possibly yours too, that isn’t entirely clear yet.

As you Republicans all well know, Mr. Trump is not fit to hold the office of president, but you just love him because you can manipulate him into doing the damage to this nation you have wanted to do for a long time.  Among the damage:

-destroy the post office even though it is provided for in the Constitution, to benefit rich corporations who will donate to your future campaigns
-Destroy public lands on behalf of hugely wealthy  donors
-force through judgeships for people who are neither qualified nor ethically suited to be a judge of anything
-slow and impede the response to COVID19 at the expense of many lives.  Your president is OK with it since they are mostly old people and people of color who are dying, and in blue states too, win-win-win!
-You give most of the money in stimulus to the huge corporations who, by rights, should be able to fend for themselves with all the other corporate welfare you have blessed them with over the years.
-You are trying to reinstate the “Patriot Act” which was wrong when it was passed by the frightened white guys in Congress who couldn’t think of anything else but to take away people’s rights and supports in a time of crisis, unfortunately shaming and lying colleagues into going along with you.
-You allow our Justice Department to become Mr. Trump’s lapdogs, instating and dismissing cases at the president’s whim
-You dismiss climate change (global warming) as a hoax, which of course you know it isn’t, and that it’s serious.  What does that make you, hypocrites?
-You are OK with gerrymandering, voter suppression in its many forms, and forcing voters to go in crowds to vote and risk their lives or give up the vote.

I could go on because there is so much I didn’t get to, but alas, you wouldn't read it anyway.  You all are deeply under the spell of a man who thinks and acts like an 8-year-old school yard bully and you all know that about him.  He is moving into the beginnings of dementia.  You all know that too and still cling to him because Republicans, you know, are ethically bankrupt.  You knew Mr. Trump committed the crimes he was impeached for, and more.  To prove you knew, you made it so there could be no witnesses in his trial.  That says nothing about Mr. Trump's innocence, only your guilt.

As a teacher, during Teacher Appreciation Week, I am alas, saddened to see the lack of critical thinking employed by Republicans for the past 70 years or so, from McCarthy to Trump-McConnell.  Thank goodness there have been a few bright lights among your party’s members, but ah, , too few.  I can’t help but wonder if we teachers are just not teaching critical thinking sufficient for people to make better decisions or if something else is at play.

And then, there are the ethics.  I can’t help but wonder if you are all OK with the lying and cheating that many of your party are using to obtain and maintain office:  gerrymandering, voter suppression, purging the voting roles.  You know the purpose of all these things is to deny voting rights to your fellow citizens.  You do it under the guise of protection from voter fraud, but in recent years, nearly all the voter fraud in the extremely rare cases where there was any, was done by Republican voters.

I can only hope you all will do better in the future for the sake of all of us, but the nearly certain thing, change is really hard, especially if you are getting the changes to our country you want for your own benefit.  You might start to think a bit about why you want so many to have fewer rights than you have, why you continue to blame poor people for their poverty, why you think rich people deserve more than everyone else and keep pumping money into their pockets.  Why do you despise young people so much (except your own kids, of course) that you dismiss their demands for a strong positive response to climate change (global warming), voting rights, poverty, human rights, sensible gun control, and their other issues.

Your party hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory this past quarter century.  Don’t you think it’s about time you stage your own rebellion and occasionally, put the needs of others who perhaps don’t look, think, or believe like you, ahead of your party’s destructive agenda?  Sadly, I don’t see that happening.

If you were ready to rebel at all, you would be telling McConnell, “no more nominee approvals until the nation is back on its feet, and no more incompetents approved.”  You’d tell Mr. Trump to listen to the experts, and he himself is not an expert on this.  You’d be 100% behind laws to insure every American citizen has the right and ability to vote unimpeded in every election.  You’d see the pain Americans are experiencing now and you’d be standing with them doing everything in your power to get those frontline workers everything they need to care for themselves and the people they encounter.

I know, I hear you laughing or, some of you, tossing a curse in my direction.  Oh well, another fault of us teachers.  We haven’t taught you to take and learn from a critique. 

What Liberals Want

Modern manufacturing. Not your grandpa's sweatshop.

by Ruth Sheets

I am always amazed, perhaps shocked, when I read something by Conservatives and Republicans these days.  I think it’s the audacity of their outrageous claims.  This time, it was an article called “Liberal Nostalgics Don’t Understand Jobs of the Future” by Michael Barone.  It appeared in the townhall.com blog on April 23, 2012.

Barone claims that the current administration’s desire to increase manufacturing jobs means that “liberals” want to bring back the old assembly line jobs of the post World War II era.  Because the “liberals” are nostalgic for these jobs they have no idea what the jobs of the future are going to demand.

What a bunch of bull!  Can anyone really believe that “liberals” or anyone else wants to bring back the mind numbing, brain frying repetition of those jobs?  What “liberals” really want are jobs that pay a living wage.  They want jobs working for companies that respect their workers.  They don’t want workers to be driven to put in mega hours under a threat of loss of their livelihood.  They want work that is meaningful.  They would prefer not to be pawns of employers who are addicted to money and power   

In his piece, Barone finds a way to blame past assembly line workers for the near destruction of Chrysler and General Motors.  Admittedly, the unions did make some unreasonable demands, but they were not the cause of the industry’s downfall.  That came as a result of short-sightedness on the part of the guys at the top of the auto companies.  They refused to believe that cheap, easy oil was coming to an end and that what was left would be controlled by countries/cultures that do not like us and our way of life very much.  

Detroit built gas-guzzlers when they should have been working to develop cool small cars that were safe, comfortable, and efficient.  The creative talent working in the auto industry could have managed that and more.  They also had the power of Madison Avenue on their team.  If handled well,  Americans could have been talked into buying almost anything if it was good enough.

Mr. Barone describes the jobs of the future as ones that people will create themselves, I suppose on the model of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerbburg.  It is not the “liberals” who don’t get this, it is the Conservatives who put roadblocks in the way of nearly every attempt to make this a reality.  It was not the “liberals who made irrelevant testing the main indicator of student success in school.  It is not the “liberals” who cut research and development setting back efforts to find new directions for producing the jobs of the future.

The “liberals” didn’t cut assistance to help creative people get businesses started.  It’s not the “liberals” who think college is elitist and a waste of time.  It’s the Conservatives who want to take America back to some imagined golden time, (except for the tax rates which they would like to see as close to zero as possible, of course).

I worry that an argument like Mr. Barone’s is so simple that a lot of people will accept it without thinking critically about whether it is true.   

Oh wait, we don’t get to teach that critical thinking stuff or creativity in schools since it’s not on the test.  We “liberals” had better get busy.