Haven't been here in a while. Sorry. I've been slaving away.

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I'm not a party person. Never admired either party. Political parties exist primarily for the good of their political parties, not for the people. The primary goal of parties is to build animosity and create sensationalism, to stay dedicated to age-old “principles” until they fossilize into prejudice. And only rarely do the “parties” seek common ground with one another to compromise and accomplish something.

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But, ladies and gentlemen, when a political party gets control of government, it’s different. The primary goal of government is not to solve every problem by elevating its status as though it is the most vital concern to humanity. The goal of government is not to agitate and pick fights. The goal is to keep a lid on all that stuff, to balance maximum freedoms with peaceful coexistence, despite the differences. The goal of government is not to tear us apart. The goal is to seek solutions, to promote efforts to find solutions, and to welcome intelligent, well thought out solutions of all sorts. Government’s goal is not to force feed solutions, as a tyrant does, with tantrums, but to get us to the next day without tearing us apart. All the public bickering and mud-slinging needs to stop. Lots of people think that’s the fun of politics, but when that party’s over, it’s over! Whichever side obtains power must deal with the real business of government, keeping a lid on it.

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What’s really eating at people nowadays is the Civil War. That war never ended. It was fought in this country to end slavery. It became a war when the Government abdicated its responsibility. Instead of calming the decades-old irrational outbursts, the Government just let things slide until it finally had no choice but to join in, and the battle was on, and the country became divided.

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And the problem of slavery? Well, that was never really solved. We’re still dealing with it. We still pay people less money than they need to live on. Two hundred years ago, we gave them a shack and some worn out clothes and made them find ways to survive when they were finished in the fields.

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Nowadays, we give them eight bucks an hour and make them live on that! Even with two or three family members working, those wages don’t cover expenses the way privileged wages do. So we have working poor. We even have homeless workers now.

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Oh, but business is booming, isn’t it?

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We promote slavery by allowing people to become indentured servants. They volunteer to become enslaved. They try to cover debts by taking on more debt, and the “Master,” the boss of the Big Bank, he gets to collect interest and compound it. Slavery has broadened its scope. Nearly every one of us is a slave. We spend hours of our day earning money to pay interest at the end of the month. Only difference among us is, some are having awful luck crawling out from under the debt, and that debt, that burden of indentured servitude, is relentless, and it grows.

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And business, it does hum!

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It is becoming clear that minimum wages need to be raised, because wages that don’t support people amounts to enslavement of a sort. Government has the responsibility for that. Parties, simmer down! Tyrants, shut up! Get after that problem, Government! Find a compromise and find it soon.

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Then the debt problem, another vestige of slavery: People are convinced, by some of the noise going on, that another loan just might help to get them out of some hardship or another, and they voluntarily take on more indentured servitude, more credit cards, more installment loans, a mortgage, a second mortgage, a college loan another loan, and still more indentured servitude.

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Can’t balance those issues against wages though, can we? People who volunteer to take on more debt to get out of misery are just creating more misery for themselves, right?

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But cheap labor and interest payments sure do make the gears of business hum, don’t they, Master?

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Find us a balance, Government! How do we keep business humming, but maybe not so loud and nasty, and at the same time, provide a living to the working people? And if we’re going to maintain a slave class of people, how do we take better care of our slaves, Government?

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This is an awful mess. It’s the worst mess we’ve been in for a long time. It’s bringing out the tyrants who rant and rave and distract us with all sorts of other issues just to save them some cash. They’re extremely good at that. But now this pandemic has come along, and it’s magnified the mess, because a large portion of our essential, front line workers is from the slave class (or, if you insist upon using euphemisms, the low wage, heavily indebted class), and we’re being forced to confront the facts of it, even though most of us would rather not. 

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Times like these, a leader with a quiet approach to government suits me far better than someone who is constantly and openly sticking it to the other party, or exhorting people to "fight," whether that means storming the Capitol, or using abusive language to criticize, or filibustering, or insisting that someone stand up and read every word of a 700-page document aloud.

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Lately, however, it has become the popular thing to repeat rumor as though it is doctrine, to seek out the science that suits your personal views, to find friends to help you spout disgust and hatred for the “extreme right” or “extreme left,” and when you get into a discussion with one of those “idiots” (although you try hard to avoid such a thing), where the “idiot” makes you uncomfortable by asking you to provide more evidence, you end the conversation. You just repeat the party line, tell her or him that they’ve got it wrong, and retreat to your fossilized principles.

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So if I can find a candidate, in any party, who tries hard to be honest, who selects words carefully, tries not to talk too much, tries not to seek out confrontation just to make a name for herself or himself, responds either quietly to criticism or not at all, I will vote for that person, if I have the opportunity to do so, regardless which "party" has hold of her or him at the moment.

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Government does far too little and makes far too much noise as it is.