Horatio Alger on Crack

Fighting Greed and Corruption in Government is
Going to Require Making New Friends

GRANNY D / Orion Magazine Feb03

People who have an educated view of what is happening in the world understand that U.S. policy is not serving justice or peace, and they understand that the world's environmental is now gravely endangered by official U.S. policy. It is frustrating for these people to sense that, after several decades of dumbed-down education and constant media misinformation, they are now a minority in America, or at least that is the way elections are turning. Most people, in fact, want the environment protected, and they want the U.S. to be an agent of justice and peace in the world. Turning that real majority into a political majority will be difficult, but the prospect should be encouraging to those who care.

One strategy that ought to be considered is appealing to the American right. The present assault on the Bill of Rights by the military-industrial complex ought to and can create a common cause between the more thoughtful members of the right and left. Those on the right who feel that their powers have been undermined--the power to raise their families according to traditional moral values, for instance--need to understand that the only way to protect a family now is to preserve personal freedom, save the human scale of the economy, and save the very environment.

What we are seeing now from the far right is not conservatism at all. It is fascism: the imposition of a national and worldwide police state to enforce a narrow worldview that enriches and empowers the few at the expense of the many, and that gives no respect or honor to other cultures, ways of living, or opinions. To call that conservatism is a crime against the memory of America's great and true conservatives, who might think that government ought to be less involved in daily life than we old liberals do, but who nevertheless stood for the core American values that today's leaders undermine at every opportunity.

We are living in the harsh world invented by a handful of corporate raiders whose values are completely foreign to the fairness and moderation that had so long served as the proper foundation of American success and the American dream. This new world devolved as if from a virus, and the new business hero, Horatio Alger on crack, did very well. A Darwinian system of corporate survival assure that the most carnivores, rather than the most responsible, have risen to lead our most powerful commercial organizations. These superwealthy predators, through their political patronage, control both political parties. They control Congress and the White House.

If we Americans are split into two meaningful camps today, it is not right versus left. The two camps are these: the poltically awake and the hypnotized---hypnotized by television and other mass media that dangle packaged candidates and ofttold lies, people who are suckered into forking over their own political best interests. It is all done to politically prolong the open season on anyone, conservative or liberal, who places morals over profit, as the billionaire corporate takeover artist bag their catch for the day. And in their bags are our freedoms, our health-care futures, our old-age security, our family time, our village life, our small businesses on Main Street, the middle class itself, and our position of honor in the world.

Political success is often a matter of empowering people. The instincts of the American right are not evil--they are all for moral living and family strength. And they are good fighters. We have different views of the role of government, but we can arm-wrestle over that in good humor after we have together saved the world from the forces of greed and corruption that our common enemy today.

Doris Haddock, a.k.a. Granny D, walked 3200 miles across America to draw attention to the need for campaign finance reform. She has sixteen great-grandchildren. Visit www.GrannyD.com