By Calvin Hill
One of the more useless school exercises that promoted a sense of American unity and camaraderie was a “civil defense” drill that had childhood baby boomers crawling under our desks to prevent harm and save our lives in the event of a nuclear attack. The need for the occasional, and necessary, fire drill, tended to give the absurdity of the civil defense drill an air of legitimacy. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were lost on the youthful and uneducated innocence of us boomers – so convinced were we, that our government had the best interests of the survival of the future brainpower of America.
Now we are engaged in a great civil discourse. On Sept. 11, 2019, those children who have been told of the anguish and debilitation of parental joy that accompanied their birth on that date will be eligible to vote for the first time. However, the terrorism drills, both foreign, and mostly domestic, have a very scary and very familiar reality to their lives. The blood and guts that many have personally witnessed, of their classmates, siblings, friends, teachers and fellow parishioners have the same traumatic effect on their young lives as our war damaged veterans who are alarmingly suicidal – some of these children having suffered the same fate. Having crawled under my desk at PS 188 on the Lower East Side of New York amid the laughter and giggles of my fellow classmates and never hearing the boom of a bomb of any type, it is absolutely unimaginable to comprehend the fear of 6, 10 and 15 year olds being herded into a school closet, barricading a classroom door, or perhaps climbing out of a classroom window texting loving, goodbye messages to their parents as the pop, pop, pop of gunfire explodes all around them.
Six months before her 10th birthday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was like hundreds of thousands of American 9 year olds consumed with fear about their daily safety when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold unleashed their assault weapons and massacred innocent members of the student population at Columbine High School in Colorado. Two months after her 23rd birthday, Alexandria had to witness, as did the rest of the nation, 20 Connecticut first graders who would never get to celebrate a 10th birthday or the ensuing Christmas. And 5 years after knowing that the murderer of those 20 first graders and 6 of their teachers, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had a burgeoning history of mental instability, President Donald J. Trump signed a Republican led piece of legislation making it easier for the mentally ill to legally purchase guns.
At 29 years of age, Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest person to be elected to Congress and has developed a rock star quality following of Americans from preteens to senior citizens merely by pointing out the lack of credible responses by government to endless mass shootings, abnormal seasonal flooding and wildfires, healthcare inequality, wage inequality, usurious debt, homelessness, childhood poverty, and the absolute disinterest of the top monied 1% to contribute to any solutions to repair any of these societal ills. The pseudo-conservatives, having hitched their malleable ideology to a fake Republican president who has hitched his fortune to Vladimir Putin, have launched a transparent and dishonest assault against the freshman representative. Having declared herself a Democratic Socialist, the blathering nabob mouthpieces performing media manipulation for the GOP, have declared AOC’s roadmap to slow the dangers of the reality of climate change to an absurdity of making hamburgers and jet travel extinct.
The Republican Party is content to relegate the real effects of climate change to the presidential talking point that it is all a hoax started by the Chinese. Somehow, the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, off-year flooding, melting polar ice caps and tsunamis are a figment of the American mind – perpetrated by a foreign government incapable of eliminating the smog over Beijing. Apparently, Donald Trump would not believe in the effects of climate change unless a hurricane laced tornado lifted Mar-a-Lago up by its roots and set it down upon a yellow brick road on Auntie Em’s farm in Kansas.
Categorizing the need for a smarter, cheaper healthcare system, that every industrialized nation provides its citizenry, and a starting point to combat the weather damage to planet Earth has evoked cries of socialism from the faux conservatives of America. Alleging themselves to be capitalists, they have abandoned their opposition to tariffs while government largesse to farmers and higher consumer prices fuel the ego of Donald Trump’s economic incompetence. While no Trumpnik dare call it socialism, it is certainly not capitalism. In real free market capitalism, the economy should work for everyone. These post conservative ideologues defend the right of the wealthy to purchase legislation and government subsidies while also denying labor and consumers the right to bargain for wages, benefits and reasonable safety nets under the guise that the latter is socialism, while pretending that their “socialism for oligarchs” is free market capitalism. Taking Medicaid money from women, children and the disabled, and Medicare money from senior citizens and giving it to CEOs is socialism for oligarchs. It is not capitalism. The trickle up tax policy resulting in stock buybacks and zero corporate tax liability is not free market capitalism. It is socialism for oligarchs. Legislating unions away from the bargaining table is not free market capitalism. It is practically communism.
In 2018, the Republican tactic of trashing Nancy Pelosi, that worked for them during the Obama midterms, failed miserably as she recaptured the leadership of the House of Representatives for the Democratic Party. Subsequently, they feel a dire need to present a new boogiewoman to frighten the American people. Enter AOC.
The hypocrisy of the Republican legislature is on full display when they go to the press, “off the record,” and echo the frustrations of former staff and cabinet members of the Trump administration with the expletive laced iterations that the president is a moron and an idiot. But publicly, they will voice full support for the president no matter the damage, how preposterous the lie, or the overarching security threat to the institutions that have secured the republic throughout its history. Unfortunately, truth has become a threat to Republican power. And as AOC fearlessly points out the folly of their policies and the calamity that these policies have visited upon the lives of the American working public, the Republicans have spun their own cauldron of lies on top of the 10,000 that the president has already told.
The vastness of the diversity in age, race, ethnicity, party and economic status that positively responds to the freshman Congresswoman from the Bronx terrifies the Republican hierarchy. Six years seems a long time in the grand scheme of things. But in politics, it is a single term for a US Senator. That could be a tipping point for AOC. Therefore, it is not too difficult to imagine that somewhere in a dark, cigar smoke filled golf recess, that a small horde of greedy American oligarchs are contemplating an insidious strategy to quell her political momentum and popularity before those six years go by when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be 35 years old.
The Op-Ed Alternative 