Sen. Joe Manchin (WhateverTheHell-West Virginia) has confounded the country, along with his cohort Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (WhateverTheHell-Arizona) in their hell-bent-for-leather push to stay in office by appealing to the basest of their bases.
The reluctance of these two U.S. Senators to vote with their party to weave a stronger social safety net has left me thinking about the role of compassion in public life — as opposed to the whole pulling-one’s-self-up-by-one’s-bootstraps nonsense favored by the elected landed gentry, who insist, whilst wiping the butter from their chins, that ‘Muricans don’t want a hand out and so they cannot possibly support a Build Back…Something spending plan.
Paid family leave? Off the table.
Free community college? Nope.
My New York Times letters to the editor page was packed yesterday with conservatives and moderate Democrats decrying Pres. Biden’s purported move to the left in even suggesting such programs. Well, guess what? We can pay for these programs — and more — if we tax the rich and stop listening to hypocritical Manchins.
And no, Joe, taxing billionaires so that they pay their fair share is not “divisive” outside of the country club set. It’s right and it’s righteous, and it’s folly to think ‘Muricans can all pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that a some of us don’t even have boots, and a little compassion mixed in with the charts and graphs and stats would go a looong way.
Thank you for calling out the word compassion aloud, and for recognizing that bootstraps indicate you have boots. Some of our best people are currently shoeless. And it breaks my heart.
It seems to me that we fail to teach our children the fundamentals such as compassion. We never think that we will have needs and therefore don't need bv to be compassionate to those who do. I am saddened by people who can't put themselves in the shoes of another or walk barefoot if one has no shoes.