A Bunch of Wimps, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #339 | @MDWorld
September 2, 2013 Mike Gold 6 Comments
Remember when Labor Day celebrated the efforts of people who worked hard for a living?
Naw. I don’t either. Even in states that ban the sale of automobiles on Sunday (I gather Christ only bought cars on weekdays), you can get a good deal on last year’s model on the only day of the year set aside for workers to chill out. One last picnic before we run out of daylight.
It’s labor’s own fault. The working class has failed to stand up for itself for two generations now. Union representation is down to negligible numbers, and the working class seems just fine with losing their pensions and their health care while being duped into thinking that Obamacare is evil. Actually, the Rabid Right (and I apologize for the alliterative redundancy) has masterfully redefined terms like “union,” “labor,” and “health care” as evil, as plagues infested upon us by the non-existent Soviet Union.
(Have you noticed how the Rabid Right still refers to Russian as “the Soviets?” These are the same ignoramuses who equated fascism with socialism, who don’t have a clue what socialism is, and who carry protest signs proclaiming “Keep The Government’s Hands Of My Medicare!” Me? I still like to call that big nation out east “Red China.” It sounds like I just came back from shopping at Target.)
For that matter, our rapidly deteriorating abortion rights are the fault of the feminist movement. For some reason, people on the Left think that once they won an argument, they’ve won that argument forever because, after all, the Left is good and Left is right.
A study of the Middle East shows that Muslim fundamentalists are patient. They can wait a long time to make a move, but when they do, it’s tits to the wind. The Christian Right has the same exact capability, as the severe rollbacks in labor, health, education, voting and abortion rights have shown us with the clarity of a morning in America.
And the Left whimpers. They don’t even bitch. They just take it. They’d rather be right than actually protect their gains. The fact is, bringing about change is and has always been a political act, and you cannot have purity in politics.
Protecting the successes of the past is an absolute necessity. Even Ray Charles can see that, and not only is Ray blind, he’s also dead. Rights are not granted by some hoary thunderer or cosmic muffin: rights are fought for with sweat, jizz, piss and blood.
And rights unused are rights you do not have. No matter what it says on some piece of paper, you only know for certain that you actually have a right once you’ve successfully exercised it. And your success makes it a tiny bit easier for the next person.
Stop whining. Get off your ass. Stand up for your rights.
And happy Labor Day.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
George Haberberger
September 2, 2013 - 11:47 am
” For that matter, our rapidly deteriorating abortion rights are the fault of the feminist movement. For some reason, people on the Left think that once they won an argument, they’ve won that argument forever because, after all, the Left is good and Left is right.”
Ah yes, that misplaced sense of moral superiority that the left is always so surprised people have a problem with. Nice to see that you can acknowledge that such dissonance exists.
For my part, the “rapidly deteriorating abortion rights”, (they’re not really rights when they deprive others of theirs, [Did slave-owners have the right to own someone?]), are not deteriorating nearly fast enough. But change is coming.
You may believe that those “rights” are deteriorating, but the reality is that the country’s attitude about abortion on demand is changing to reflect the advance of medical science and the philosophical thought that comes with it.
The Pro-Life movement understands that the battle will never be over and that constant vigilance is necessary against the idea that the value of life is predicated on the needs or wants of a third party.
Doug Abramson
September 2, 2013 - 2:47 pm
And henceforth all references to women in the legal code will be replaced with incubators.
Rene
September 3, 2013 - 5:35 am
Strangely, the Soviet Union indirectly helped the West. When it was still alive, and strong and kicking, the USSR served as a nice bogeyman. The rich elites in the West couldn’t abuse their poor with impunity, because there was always fear that the poor would turn to the example of the Soviets.
The West had to “beat” the Soviet system, and that included treating their own poor in a way that kept them believing in Capitalism, even if minimaly.
Then the USSR weakened, and then died. And that is what it took for the Right to announce that Capitalism had won forever and ever, and now we don’t need to be nice anymore, let the poor fend for themselves. And so we had Reagan and both Bushes, and even Clinton was very much a Free Market advocate, for a Democrat.
As for eroding rights. The problem with the Left is in their very name: progressists. We believe in social progress, and we believe that progress is a continual, eternal, irreversible process. Once we gain certain rights, that is it, things can only get better.
But it’s not that simple. While I do believe that the general thrust of mankind’s history is progressive, we do sometimes fall back, indeed sometimes we regress for several centuries. We should watch out for that.
George –
While I agree with you that abortion “rights” are not rights one should be proud of. I am worried. We get the Left in the wrong side of this issue, and we have the Right supporting the correct side but for the wrong reasons.
I’m not talking about you, personally. But most right-wingers don’t give a damn about protecting the defenseless. They don’t have a problem with poor kids starving or being sent to war. It’s just abortion that gets to them, why?
Because they see it as another example of sex being “trivialized”, because they want a society where sexual behaviour is “ordered”, because they want to support a certain family structure, and their idea of supporting is actually imposing it, except they fail to note that their favorite economic model doesn’t really support that family structure.
Because economically the Left wants to have all humanity living in happiness, peace, and plenty, they should be anti-abortion. The Right, that claims to want people to compete for resources and glorifies the strongest and most capable.
Here is what Ayn Rand says about it:
“An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).”
“Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”
Hahaha! Hey, Mike, you agree with Ayn Rand about something.
Rene
September 3, 2013 - 5:49 am
I accidentaly deleted a paragraph, correcting it:
The Right, that claims to want people to compete for resources and glorifies the strongest and most capable, should be pro-abortion.
They keep saying the poor are “parasites”, that mooch off the tax payers. Well, fetuses are the ultimate “parasites”. They can’t make it on their own. Fetuses can’t be “entrepreuners”.
And since the Right keeps hammering in that charity must be voluntary, it’s perfectly consistent to their economic ethos to assume that a mother can’t be coerced into supporting a “parasite” or a moocher. The mother’s charity in supporting the fetuses must be voluntary, right?
Rick Oliver
September 3, 2013 - 7:37 am
Got an email from my former congressional rep Joe Walsh that essentially said that it was okay to overturn the voting rights act because too many black children are born out of wedlock. He proposed his own “dream” to replace that of Martin Luther King that curiously didn’t include anything about birth control or access to family planning services. He did say “I have a dream that all black parents will have the right to choose where their kids attend school” — but he didn’t say anything about who would pay for that.
Giving money to charity is terrific, but most charitable donations tend to be religious or local. In the overwhelming Republican area where I live, people bitch about property taxes that pay for the schools their own children attend. I can’t see then donating much to schools for inner city kids.
But hey, it’s only a dream. Sooner or later you’re going to wake up.
Mike Gold
September 5, 2013 - 9:25 am
Welfare schools. It’s the new black.