Roe v. Wade = Communism & Socialism
Now that the conservative bastards on the Supreme Court have launched their long-cherished final assault on the brief spurt of liberalism which flared over the last ten or so years, it’s time for the so-called Left to take these shitheads at their word and respond by becoming a real Left.
If Trump and the rest of the POS/GOP want to refer to us as Socialists and Communists, we should stop fucking around with a political stance which is about as much on the Left as Leonard is on the Left. Leonard happens to be my cat.
Sorry folks, but the Green New Deal isn’t Socialism. It’s just a rational way to respond to climate change. The electricity coming into my house is produced by a big electric farm about a mile down the road. Meanwhile, my monthly electric bill keeps going up.
And despite what big-mouth Bernie says, free college tuition also isn’t some kind of Socialist ideal. When I lived in Spain during the worst years of the Franco regime (1969–71), there was no tuition charge at the University of Madrid and by the way, every, single village in the country had a free medical clinic and a free doctor courtesy of the fascist state.
Socialism doesn’t mean we raise taxes on the top 5 percent to close the so-called (and phony) wage gap. Communism doesn’t mean we defund the police. And by the way, these words don’t have to mean what they were supposed to mean fifty years ago in places like China or North Viet Nam, because the world changes (thank God) and every society has a unique and different national culture and national history, so comparing one society to another just doesn’t work.
Here’s what the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ mean to me:
· A society which doesn’t have national borders and allows anyone to enter, stay and live wherever they want, no questions asked.
· A society which provides comprehensive medical care with the goal of extending and prolonging life regardless of cost.
· A society which guarantees a roof over everyone’s head at night and three meals during the day, whether someone can afford these necessities or not.
· A society whose military can only be trained and deployed in response to a domestic threat.
· A society which supports an educational system that delivers excellence in every classroom no matter who’s sitting behind the desks.
· A society which starts everyone entering the workforce for the first time with an equitable wage.
· A society which doesn’t define ‘success’ as ‘winning,’ but defines it as living a decent and fulfilling life.
Notice that the word ‘country’ isn’t mentioned above. That’s because the concept of a ‘country’ says just about everything which is wrong in this life and nothing which is right. Countries breed nationalism, which happens to be the reason we continue to fight wars. Countries are often considered to be endowed by a spiritual creator, as if we should be taught to believe in someone who may or may not exist.
Worst of all, countries are totally artificial and are usually formed by accidents of geography, or history, or both, and in most cases started off because some White men from a little corner of the globe known as Western Europe went out and gobbled up some land and some natural resources which nobody previously owned.
I live about ten miles from a little area known as the Montague Plateau. It used to be a farming area for the Wampanoag tribe, which cultivated the land by rotating crops and burning off vegetation to provide natural fertilizers on the ground. The Wampanoags lived this way because they didn’t practice private ownership of land.
Know what happened when the British colonial government began issuing land grants to encourage settlement and farming away from the coast? The Wampanoags were told to take a hike, get the fuck off their land, and disappear — which is what they did.
Now the Wampanoags are still trying to get a license to open another casino somewhere else.
I’m not kidding myself or my readers into thinking that any of the societal changes listed above will take place in my lifetime, or the lifetimes of my kids or their kids. But if we’re going to be accused of being Socialists or Communists by the POS/GOP and their hirelings on the Supreme Court, we should be willing to promote a real alternative to the current system that goes beyond gender-free bathrooms at the very least.
