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Letter: Liberals: It’s not the economy, it’s people
Op-Ed · November 13, 2014
In realization while listening to Mitch McConnell’s early Senate victory address which before dawn had come to cover the Republicans winning all of Congress:
In sweeping to victory in this election the Republicans have crudely painted themselves as what historically would get them confused with Andrew Jackson era populists.
Shades of crucifixion on a new-age cross of gold, they have achieved what last tried William Jennings Brian did not, a populist victory in a here-and-now that is not your great-great-great-great-grandfather’s craft-agrarian times where a fast horse and buggy got folks as far across the county as they only once in a while needed to go, and plodding oxen took the free spirits into the wilderness to a dreamed of promised land that was as far distant from the roots of their family tree a some itchy feet, or a wanderlust, or a need to just get out of town would take ‘em beyond a far horizon.
In the more pressing reality of these times, Republican populists are crowded with all of us into a far different and complexly interrelated world in which everyone is confined in a cyber space of 4 nanosecond dimensions in which a fast-food breakfast is dependent upon what goes on far beyond a non-existent backyard chicken coop, and everything else in the daylight-savings-time day of falling back to spring forward as everything comes home to roost from as far, or a close, as all the way around the world east, west, north and/or south just in time.
This Republican populist paint job applied to their conservative carcass is going to start looking very weatherbeaten very fast a the same-O new realities sink further in and don’t not run off on their own: global warming, fast growing demand by as fast growing and consuming world population, that old-time religious fervor that gets ever furious fast, a fast-developing age of robotics and automated production in which fewer and fewer people get a piece of the action as headers of the nations wealth feed their insatiable greed and as many other challenges that are more unseen than overlooked.
But drink up in victory; a bit of the hair-of-the-dog may kindly perpetuate a hangover that soon looks better than getting sobered up by facts that just don’t go away on their own — it is the coming of the Age of the Actuary.
Meanwhile liberals and progressive had best understand: it’s not the economy, stupid; it’s the people!
Sam Osborne, West Branch
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