Have you ever wondered why your day-to-day life is so stressed and why life always seems to be growing harder? Society seems to be deteriorating with more shootings and more homeless living in the streets. Society is having a hard time living in normal civilized behavior. Why? Something is shackling humanitarian progress. Have you noticed that our government is virtually stymied whenever legislation, unanimously supported by its voters, is introduced in Congress? There appears to be a modern-day death cult, with a grudge, that places a lid on society to kill its ambitions, its wishes, its dreams.
The cult favors working for the rich while exhibiting open opposition to social wellness for the poor and middle classes who are forced to stay in their place.
The hypocrisy of the American death cult is that it feigns to help everyone while it only helps the rich upper class that dominates Congress. The cult fights all social improvements that perhaps could lead to lower profitability for the rich.
This death cult started with Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1953), an American political theorist, moralist and historian. Kirk brought his views into focus with his 1953 book “The Conservative Mind.” It gave shape to the postwar conservative movement in the U.S. Thom Hartmann, the American political activist, commented on his book with various astute observations.
Kirk noticed that, since World War II, the bottom 90% of society was getting richer a lot faster than the top 5%, and if that were to continue, he claimed, “It will be the end of American society.” Kirk said, “Young people will stop respecting their elders, women will no longer know their place, racial groups will start demanding equality with white people, and working people will no longer respect their bosses.” Kirk predicted, “that this, the growing class phenomenon that everyone was witnessing, the fastest growth of the middle-class in the world, if that continues, if average people being as they are, being greedy as they are, being pick-pockets, and thieves and shoplifters, given a chance-as they are; if average people get wealthier and wealthier, if that happens, it’s going to be the end of American society.” His solution: “We’ve got to strip back the wealth of this middle-class or this country will become a hellhole.”
Nobody took him seriously in the U.S. until it awakened Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., who had a following among the intelligentsia. With apprehension they witnessed:
• In 1963, when the women’s movement was kicked off, and birth control pills were in full use, women controlled their own reproduction and started demanding an equal place in the marketplace, the job market.
• In 1966-67, young people pushed back on the war in Vietnam.
• The civil rights movement, organized with Dr. Martin Luther King, was scary to white conservatives.
• Union workers were going on strike in record numbers.
• By 1967-68-69 you had cities on fire, women burning their bras, and the young burning their draft cards.
At that point, the aristocracies in the conservative Republican Party and even some neo-liberal Democrats looked at Kirk’s writing and said, “My God, he’s right!” So, with this convoluted revelation, conservative philosophy became engrained, and the rest is history.
By 1981, Reagan stripped society back a notch with union-busting, placing a lid on average American workers to improve their lives, and the country’s middle class has been driven down ever since.
Conservatives, to this day, true to Kirk’s assessment, have stuck with his philosophy that keeps a lid on society to allow the rich to fully exploit stressed American workers. What are the ways? You cut food stamps to the bone. You ignore global warming and the damage it does to society. You keep trying to kill affordable health care and the aid to pregnant women. You fight equal pay for women, fight national help for child care services. You keep sending jobs overseas without rehabilitating workers for re-employment. You fight the control of assault weapons involved in killings, fight free college tuition, fight Medicare for all, and lately, push vaccine skepticism.
Ask why they do this?
Could it be that the GOP is simply a modern-day death cult, and proud of it?
Gerald Staack
Santa Clarita
