The Lights Are Coming On

I’m no Socialist but voted for two of them today. Those aware of my intentions kept asking me if I’m afraid they’ll lose in the end. No, that’s not my fear. The thing that scares me is what will become of our country if we’re made to forget a time when ours was a far more decent society, one that waged war on poverty, empowered the working class, made sure the rich pay their share of taxes, used the proceeds for the common good.

Today’s Republican Party likes seeing America become increasingly unjust, ever more in service of the rich and powerful. Those who rule over today’s Democratic Party can live with creeping injustice, they’re too spooked by the word socialist to keep us remembering what an equality-seeking, middle-class-building America looks and acts like.

So many threads in our nation’s fabric were sewn into place when socialism was not the bugaboo it is today. Think about the public library system, a nationwide network of community pillars making books available to every American for free. Could any modern-day equivalent of that monumental accomplishment even be considered today? Not without being condemned as radically socialist.

Think about rural electrification, a national program to string power lines up and down every city street and country road, bringing electricity to every American doorstep, every barn, every farmhouse, no matter how remote, nobody left behind. No private company would have gone to the expense of running those lines vast distances to the most sparsely populated parts of our country when they’d only have gained a few extra paying customers. It took a federal agency to do it. Is a comparable undertaking possible in today’s poisoned political climate? Not without the courage to withstand nonstop pinko commie innuendos.

Think about the postal service. Timely mail delivery to every American household, again no matter how remote. A socialist institution if there ever was one. Could such a thing be established today? Can we prevent the one we have from being dismantled? The interstate highway system, that was socialism of the highest order. Hard to imagine public works of that magnitude even be attempted nowadays. Social Security, Medicare. Critics slurred them as socialism at the moment of their creation, still do. Even the GI Bill got that treatment. Is it possible to do something together on such a grand scale again?

For America to thrive going forward, the answer to these questions has to be yes. We need to find in ourselves the capacity to say yes. Privatizing everything as we are, making everything a profit-making enterprise, is nuts. For-profit companies are good at providing wants, they’re piss-poor at meeting needs. Medical care is a vital necessity, a matter of life or death. We have let each other settle for a system that rations care depending on the size of bank accounts. Those with great means get the best care. The needs of those with little to their names are left unattended.

This is uncivilized. Morally beneath us as a society. The solution is sitting right there in plain sight, a universal single-payer system like the one every other industrialized nation in the world already has. But surely you know what it gets called. Socialized medicine.

The American Dream is out of reach for too many. The dream is that if you work hard, you can own your own home and comfortably raise a family. It’s out of reach because housing and child care have grown so blasted expensive. The “free market” made housing and child care ultra-costly markets, it will not suddenly make them affordable, that will take public intervention, a national effort, one sure to be demeaned as socialism.

Policies like universal health care and affordable day care are as American as apple pie, as American as public libraries and post offices and freeways. They make a thriving middle class possible, but those who want no part of any kind of collective venture call them radical socialism, a scare phrase pure and simple, code for “run for the hills!” As they’re running, they might notice there are power lines passing over all those hills. Wherever they come to rest, they’ll be able to flip a switch and the lights will come on.

I’m not a member of any political party, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Socialists, none of them. I got my start in life working in my family’s business, helping my folks on our dairy farm, a capitalist enterprise. I don’t want government control of all means of production. I’m comfortable leaving wants to capitalism, but meeting basic needs requires community. If you want a new cellphone or TV or washing machine or lawn mower, you’re on your own. But if we are to have decent roads to drive on, we can’t each build our own. That we have to do together. And someone will probably call it socialism.