Saturday, February 11, 2017

Entry 367: Pinkeye and Socialism

Lil' S2 came down with pinkeye Wednesday night.  It wasn't too bad, actually.  S took him to our local doc in a box, and they actually had the drops onsite, so she didn't even have to bother with a pharmacy.  And by Thursday morning, after just two doses, he looked good as new.  Of course, we still had to keep him out of daycare for a few days, but even that was not such a big deal.  S and I both have sick leave, so she took off Thursday and I took off Friday and that was that.

Lil' S2 is a pretty easy kid to take care of also.  He's more independent than his brother was at the age.  Lil' S1 would be all up in your grill demanding you entertain him every moment of the day.  Come to think of it, he's still kinda like that (except, of course, if the iPad is on, in which case you, and the entire rest of the world, do not even enter his plane of existence).  His brother's more chill.  You can play with him for a few minutes to get him going, and then if you want to, you can sit down and read or work on the computer, and he'll mostly just keep playing on his own.  You will have a mess to clean up afterward -- his two favorite activities are raiding the shoe closet and strewing everybody's footwear across the house and pulling the books off the shelf -- but you will also have a stretch of relative peace, which is so nice.

While I was home, getting paid to not work and spend time with my son, I was thinking about how weird it is that something that for me and S is no big whoop, could have been a devastating blow to somebody else in worse circumstances.  I mean, if I was a single dad living paycheck to paycheck, working a job with an hourly wage, what would I have done when Lil' S2 got pinkeye?  He couldn't go to any daycare with other kids, and I imagine asking somebody already stretched to the hilt to take two days off work and forgo two days pay is a tall order.  So what does somebody do in that situation?

Naturally I started to think about things like privilege and upbringing and personal responsibility and luck, and I came to an interesting conclusion: I might be a socialist.  I've always been very liberal, economically and otherwise, but I've never really thought of myself as a socialist.  But I might be one, or at least a Scandinavian-style quasi-socialist.  My ideal economic system, the one that would be in place if everybody thought like me, is a system of free enterprise like we have now, but with stronger regulations, higher taxes, and more social services.  I don't necessarily want bigger government, but I'm not against it.  I don't think it's inherently evil.  I want smarter, more effective and efficient government.  I want government that helps make people's lives better.  If that leads to bigger government, so be it.  And if the cost of that is that people like myself have to pay another 5% or 10% in taxes, then so be that as well.

I've never really bought the argument that providing government services somehow coddles the less fortunate and leads them into a life of laziness and dependency.  But I might be jaded, because even if it does, I don't really care.  If my tax dollars allow somebody to be lazy and not work or contribute anything of value to society, oh well.  As long as these people aren't on the streets raising hell and committing crimes, it's not really a big deal to me.  Because it probably also means that other people, who aren't lazy, who are legitimate underprivileged or down on their luck, have available the resources to get help when they need it, and to me that's well-worth the trade-off.  Why are people such sticklers about the government not helping others?  I don't understand it.*

At the moment, however, I would take an Ayn Randian, libertarian asshole, like, say, Paul Ryan, in the White House in a heart beat.  Pretty much about anybody would be better than our current shit-show of a POTUS.  This week, I actually figured out my least favorite thing about him.  It's tough to narrow it down because he has so many bad qualities -- he's sexist, racist, corrupt, untruthful, and whiny as hell -- but the one that takes the cake for me: fearmongering.  He's a total fearmonger.  He wants everybody to be scared all the time.  He wants all of us to spend our lives looking over our shoulders thinking that somebody is coming to get us at any moment.  He wants white people to be scared of black people; he wants black people to be scared of the police; he wants natural born citizens to be scared of immigrants; he wants immigrants to be scared of ICE; he wants Christians to be scared of Muslims; and he wants us all to be scared of the next big attack that's just around corner if we don't acquiesce to his every command.  It's sickening.  It's utterly odious.  And sadly it works on a lot of people.

I'm out of time.  Until next time...

*Or maybe I do.  Maybe it's just good old fashion racism.  I mean, let's be honest, if the US was 99% white we would probably be much more like Scandinavia right now.  (A racially and culturally homogeneous population is one of the reasons socialism works there.)  We don't mind the government providing services to us and people like us; we just don't like the government providing services to them.

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