Maybe it was a 30 plus day government shutdown, maybe it was our president claiming that 800,000 federal workers were Democrats, maybe it was Nancy Pelosi using a shutdown to play politics and refuse to negotiate, or maybe it was Wilber Ross saying that he didn’t understand why not receiving a paycheck for over a month would make people go to a foodbank. Whatever it was, this shutdown was clear evidence that our government is full of people who put party above country and have absolutely no idea what real Americans are going through.
I would say that the shutdown was the canary in the coal mine dying but that canary died years ago. In all reality the shutdown was a zombie canary that has died several times over and finally was beheaded like in The Walking Dead. But should we really be surprised that all of this is happening? What do we expect is going to happen when 50% of our government is made up of millionaires and Trumps team is made up of multi-millionaires and billionaires. We are talking about people who are so far removed from the reality that most Americans live in that instead of asking why don’t they get it we should be asking ourselves why are we surprised that they don’t get it?
To me it was like the public shift in how Americans viewed war before Vietnam and after Vietnam. It was the first war that Americans saw footage of war and the collateral damage that was being caused. Americans for the first time saw war for what it was and they couldn’t look at it in the same way and demanded change and an end to the war. It took seeing war for Americans to have a paradigm shift. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, it was that it was so far away that they just didn’t know.
I think what we are saying is that it isn’t that the wealthy don’t necessarily care, its that they are so far removed from the struggles of regular Americans that they don’t see the collateral damage of their policies and political games. They don’t see the problems that their tactics to get elected or their rhetoric creates. But that brings up the question of do they have the ability to represent us if they don’t understand us? I think that answer is resoundingly clear. Texas State Rep. John Bucy said it himself, that you can’t run for office if you are not wealthy because it doesn’t pay enough. The worse part is that they want it that way…which means the system is rigged to only elect wealthy people that largely have no ability to understand the average American.
Join us as we discuss this all too important topic and try to figure out who we want to be as a country and what we need to take the country back & elect people that actually have the ability to represent and understand us. Joining me in the studio as always is my co-host Bill “Billy Ray” Reed of the armchairqb.org and we are also joined by our political correspondent Richard “The Professor” DeVine.
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