Look around you. Watch people carefully weighing their groceries and choosing produce that’s on sale. Open your eyes to the food, housing and health care insecurity around you. How many of your friends and family have unmet dental needs? Who is unhealthy, injured or overweight and they can’t get healthy because they can’t afford support, a membership at the gym, or they don’t have the time to go anyway?
You are looking at the 99%. Think about that. Almost everyone is this distressed. Almost everyone…
Then ask yourself: “What person could accept a $180,000,000 severance package? Who could do this and sleep at night? How can anyone think, even for a second, that this is reasonable or ethical?”
Now, take a deep breath and ask yourself one more question. “How bad must it get before I decide that my government – as it is – has lost legitimacy?”
Governments are like chicken coops. (Trust me – they really are!)
You build them, all spanking new and perfect. They serve almost perfectly to protect your birds, provide nesting spaces, keep out the raccoons and hawks (mostly), the land is fresh and new, there is grass on the ground and no mites or mold anywhere.
Ten years later, the floor boards are rotting through, the grass gave way to mud which gave way to attempts to grow grass which gave way to a huge, thick layer of wood chips over landscaping fabric which melted down into earthy mud, which gave way to puddles, while years of rat holes (temporarily eradicated only to return again) are undermining the very cinder blocks the entire coop is built upon and mushrooms grow on the moist parts of the plywood walls as paint flakes away under the duress of sun and rain and ice and more sun and rain and ice…
At this point, you look at your coop and you say to yourself, “Honestly, I’d be better off just taking it all apart, pulling down the fences, and building a new coop on a frame with wheels that I can put on a new acre and this time, I’ll do a few things differently. Not everything, but a few things.”
That is where I believe we are today.
Now, how do we take what’s great about our system — keep it — and get rid of the crap?
