A House Divided Still Cannot Stand: Inflation, Violence & Covid

It’s pretty hard for me to muster up sympathy for people who shoot themselves in their own foot. Oh, it isn’t that I don’t feel bad for that kind of folk gimping around all the time but sympathy? Nah. They’re responsible for what they do and that includes shooting themselves. I do feel a certain obligation toward wanting to take the gun away from them, but then it is their right to own the gun and use it as they deem fit. Don’t you think?

For example, I heard on the news this past week that there are three things that are major issues on the minds of folks across the country. There’s Covid, to be sure. Then there’s how much it’s going to cost folks to keep on buying groceries and gas. Not to mention how much it might cost to buy even a used car. And then there’s crime. According to safehome.org, overall violent crime is up 12% which includes a 28% increase in murder and manslaughter, rape is up 38% and aggravated assault is up 29%. That is disturbing. On the other hand, overall property crime is down 33%. Burglary is down 51%, larceny-theft down 33% and motor vehicle theft is down 48%.

Now I understand how cool it is to be able to chant “Let’s go Brandon”, but come on folks, how much fun can one have with a code? Even when I was young, Pig Latin, the only code we could imagine, soon lost its appeal. It’s true that inflation is at a 30% or 40% year high depending on who you talk to, but which other president has had to deal with a pandemic encouraged by his predecessor? I’m not willing to say the Mar Largo Misfit is totally at fault for the devastating effect Covid has had on the US population, but I am willing to say that he didn’t help much either. Do you remember Nancy Messonnier? No? Well she was the CDC official who sounded early warning alarms about the threat that Covid posed to the US in early 2020. I think it was as early as January of that year. She was then pressured by The Meany of Mar Largo to the point she resigned. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Messonnier said during a media briefing at the time. Yo Republicans! Ms. Nancy had it spot on right. Do you folks really want to lay claim to the idea that it appears that you thought at that time that Covid was going to affect east and west coast Democrats more than folks living in red states?

See, the part that just bothers me no end is that inflation is costing good, honest working-their-butts-off folks, because the government had to overreact to control Covid as much as they could. Then old Joe came along and did something decent for those same folks and got them some money. That didn’t help inflation, but it damned sure helped a whole lot of people who were in a world of hurt at that time. So yeah, I guess it’s his fault that inflation is at a 40% year high. But I’d rather have high inflation now than what would have happened if old Joe didn’t get some cash out to those folks that were in a world of hurt back then. That’s just good ol’ fashioned horse sense. That’s not all of it either. Due to ignoring the coming tsunami of lockdowns to keep the hospitals from being overrun with Covid there were and still are ships waiting to be loaded and unloaded. For a while there, it was even difficult for truckers to deliver goods. It was old Joe who put the harbors in Long Beach and LA on two shifts by the way. The orange guy didn’t want anyone to know that there was a problem. He thought it would hurt his standing in the world if he admitted that Covid was a problem that was going to affect the entire economy, even the stock market.

Let’s face it folks, Covid just flat out kicked our butts. At last count they say that more than a million people have died from Covid. God only knows how many small businesses had to close up due to Covid. And out of those businesses how many people were left without a means of income? If I were to be honest here I’d tell you that if my kids were hungry and I didn’t have a way of making an honest living to feed my babies I’d damned sure do something dishonest to get them some groceries. So would you. Parents will run into a burning building to save or protect their kids. Now here comes the part that just has me boiling over.

There are politicians who are advocating violence to combat the frustrations that everyone is experiencing. How stupid can that be? What would such a political hack gain from such a stance? Violence? Mayhem? How does that pay anyone including the goofy person advocating for violence? It can and will destroy plenty, but no one is going to gain from such stupidity. What those statistics show that I mentioned earlier, is that we don’t have a crime problem in the US. We have a violence problem. We also have a Covid problem, but violence won’t help that problem go away. We also have a problem with putting food on the table and gas in the car. But violence will not help that problem either. So can someone tell me how proposing violence for the sake of violence could be to any politician’s advantage?

Many cultures throughout history have understood that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Let’s face some reality here. In terms of the world’s economies the Libs in California have a stronger economy than Russia. California is ranked 5th in the world and Russia doesn’t make the top ten. So I have to wonder what the likes of Tucker Carlson is bitching about. How in the world economy can he claim that the government of Hungary is preferable to the government of the US or that the west coast Libs have something wrong? Wouldn’t a logical fella like old Tucker have to come around to the idea that when people are free to do what they want, (kind of a Lib sort of thing) and have the where-with-all to help other folks get up on their two hind legs, the whole society benefits?

Now maybe it’s just me but this whole thing about restricting voting to favor white people or excluding black and brown people from benefits to help them stand up on their own hind legs, or even telling women they must have a baby they can’t afford just looks like the epitome of stupidity. There’s never been a government which can control what people believe. I suppose it’s okay though because we always get what we sow. That’s what Macy’s Baby Don got. He sowed distrust in solving the Covid pandemic because he believed it would benefit him and punish his political opponents, but now the slow to anger are beginning to turn against him. I guess the old guy in the circus was right. “You can fool all the people some of the time and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.” It’s hard to support or understand people in leadership positions who do not have the common sense to realize that policies which harm their constituencies can not ever produce trust over the long term. That’s why I think it’s hard to muster up sympathy for someone who shoots themselves in the foot, don’t you think?