Level the Playing Field

Our current financial crisis has not put me in a panic. I am not afraid of the possibility of an upcoming economic depression. This is probably partly due to my cynicism of what the media tells me, and partly due to my supposed social status; I am far from the top bracket of income receivers greatly affected by stock crashes and market failures. But there is another reason that all of this economic distaster talk doesn’t bother me: I believe that a recession will be good for the United States. It will put everyone on a level playing field.

Sure, it sucks that many working class families will have a harder time making ends meet in the coming years. But we were already struggling, and the struggle has been getting more difficult for decades, long before the government admitted that it was mishandling our money. It’s no secret that the gap between the rich and poor has been expanding. In our current age in which information travels at the speed of light, we learn about the follies of our corporate masters more quickly. But we always knew it was happening. The 9-11 attacks gave our government the “right” to wage war in the Middle East, which was the pre-cursor to the economic armaggedon we’re facing now. Some conspiracy theories are just healthy paranoia, but many are based out of true accounts that we are now seeing the repercussions of.

There is hope on the horizon for our suddenly fragile capitalist society of free marketing. That is, hope for the rich to stay rich. Notice how quickly they came up with the billions of dollars needed to begin correcting the errors of their ways. We’re still fighting for proper health care and better schools – the government can’t afford to help us there (even though we pay them for those things), but when it comes to war and Wall Street the money just seems to magically appear.

They can’t lie to us anymore, for we are now seeing the truth manifesting itself. The money is there. It always has been. It was there less than a month after the collapse of the World Trade Center to begin the vendetta (I mean, the war on terrorism). It’s there now to let our government start buying up failing banks in a pathetic attempt to cover up their own mistakes. The money was there when you couldn’t get out of your shitty neighborhood because you couldn’t go to college. That time you were out of work for six months because of that unexpected car accident. They could have helped you out, but they didn’t. They were too busy spending money on monumental failures.

Redistribution of wealth is socialism, huh? Well let’s change our name then. I think the top dogs of our corporate and political sectors have proven that they are inadequate, at best, to handle money. The moral of the current financial crisis is that the people who contributed the least to the problem, the working poor, are the ones least affected by it. It sucks for everyone, certainly, but we were already poor. We already know how to survive on a limited budget. While the former elites are writhing in agony at the loss of their iPods and Starbucks visits, we’ll be hustling and grinding like we always do. So that money that you say you don’t have – give it back to the people who actually appreciate the value of what they have when they get it.

~ by doe333 on November 3, 2008.