[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] rampant socialism

[David Walters]

After suffering thru eight longs years of a government that was an end unto itself, I find all this sudden rash of anti governmentalism rather disconcerting. Last summer marked the 39th anniversary of my landing at O'Hare at 2 am and being driven to a strange place on the Westside of Chicago. My life was altered forever. I became a change agent. I spent a week with James Wiegel transforming an old gym into a great hall for the summer program. One of the great learning of that week was there is not such thing as "we can't" and "we can with what we have". Another learning was if don't have a better model - don't talk. 

 

I celebrated the election Barrack Obama as an agent of change - the kind of change that is based on a comprehensive, intentional, futuric world view or least something close to it. 

 

I mean no disrespect for Susan, but there those in our country who have fallen prey to a well funded effort to generate fear in our population with inflammatory words - like socialism. 

 

The political calculus of the Bush years was formulated by a guy named Karl Rove. It seems that he married a girl that I grew up with named Darby Hickson. When we entered high school in the fall of '63. Frank Powell, who most of you knew, was SGA President. The VP was a guy named Don Siegelman. These two guys and the rest of the SGA had the difficult job of holding together a 3,000 member student body in the face of being the school to integrate in Alabama. Don went on to become Secretary of State, Attorney General, Lt. Governor and finally Governor of Alabama in '98. Enter Karl Rove who managed to have someone to tinker with the voting computer in one large county and stole Don's bid for election in '02. If that wasn't enough, he then had one of his cronies wife appointed US attorney. She proceeded to prosecute him on bogus charges. I don't believe in coincidences. Karl is married a classmate of a political enemy who just happen to go to jail. 

 

My point in telling story is that there are far more important issues in our national life that some ungrounded fear of creeping socialism. The way in which our political life is order is in absolute shambles. It seems that all the decisions belong to the corporations. The political decisions of the 80s & 90s based on the Reaganism of getting the government off our backs produced deregulation which in turn set in motion a series of economic moves that resulted in the economic calamity we witnessed last year. That in turn spread into other markets  on a global scale. 

 

David Walters    

 

PS George West and Joe Thomas preceded us in the same school.
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